There has always been a strong note of pranking to Terry Bradshaw's work as a NFL studio analyst at Fox. Bradshaw's role is mostly that of a Vibes Guy, the most off-kilter and least self-serious participant in a show that is mostly some guys in suits going "haw haw haw" and saying "the National Football League" during breaks in Sunday's NFL programming, while an enormous animated football robot glowers or heaves or does The Dougie behind them. Bradshaw does that part well. Acting like a big goober has always been a big part of Bradshaw's personal brand, dating back to the time when he was one of the NFL's elite quarterbacks, and while it has only ever sort of been an act, there is a real performance to it as well—he never really turns that act down, at this point, but you can generally feel him deciding how much he wants to turn it up.
Except for the parts of the job which seem designed to be pranks at his expense—the ones that require speed-reading a teleprompter, saying a bunch of players' names in rapid succession as Analysis, and participating in the sort of high-velocity, zero-calorie whip-around of highlights and hype that are the stock in trade of NFL studio shows. Energetically, Terry Bradshaw is necessary to the success of this sort of studio show, which would be louder and duller without him. But it is also true that, in a practical sense, the things that this job requires of him are all things that Bradshaw is uniquely unsuited to do. So you see the problem.
It is only sort of a problem, honestly. No one watching Fox NFL Sunday would have been expecting in-depth analysis from the studio team of Monday night's matchup between Washington and Kansas City. The show guaranteed that they would not get it by leaving like 55 seconds for that conversation, and turning the task over to Bradshaw. This is the prank part: some dumb words on the prompter, a 77-year-old goofball with an instinct toward hamming it up reading those words for what is almost certainly the first time, zero margin for error, and a live television feed. If the people in charge were trying to create the circumstances that would lead Terry Bradshaw to briefly salute "Laurin McLaurin" and "Deebo Samuels" before telling the tale of how an attempt to text Andy Reid put him in touch with a mysterious pig merchant, it is hard to imagine what they might have done differently:
"The other day I text Andy Reid," Bradshaw said, in the space where he was maybe supposed to talk about the challenges the Commanders would face against the Chiefs. "And I got a text back, and I thought it was Andy Reid, but it was some guy selling pigs." The camera catches Howie Long reacting to this bit of analysis more or less the way that Hank Azaria's character reacted to Al Pacino roaring "She's got a great ass" at him in Heat. In a moment that stands out as the most overtly Joe Bidenesque in a sequence with plenty of strong competition, Bradshaw then allows that "I shouldn't have told y'all that, so y'all would've thought I talked to Andy Reid. But I didn't." The rest of the studio team is initially too startled to hit their haw-haw-haw marks; on the video screen behind the desk, Cleatus the Fox NFL Robot gazes out at the viewer from the Private Pyle angle. It is time for a commercial break.
Who was this hog dealer? How long had Terry Bradshaw been corresponding with him in the understanding that the person on the other end of the text conversation was a three-time Super Bowl champion and 2002 AP NFL Coach of the Year? Had there been any signs, prior to the sales pitch, that this pig merchant was not in fact Andy Reid, e.g. unmotivated barnyard digressions or bits of agricultural lingo that stand out in retrospect as unusual from a veteran football man? The answer to any or all of those questions would be a story that Terry Bradshaw would tell very well, but which would probably not fit in the limited space the format allows him. The most we can hope for is that Bradshaw will return to it, 55 seconds at a time, for the rest of the season, at moments when his actual job otherwise eludes or just bores him.
