Cowboys to face Browns Week 1 in Tom Brady’s booth debut

The Cowboys will kick off the 2024 regular season in Cleveland with a late-Sunday afternoon matchup in Week 1 against the Browns.

If that pairing doesn’t exactly move the needle for you, consider that the game will be broadcast on FOX and will therefore feature the booth debut of Tom Brady.

The announcement was made Monday afternoon, two days ahead of the league’s schedule release. In a live reveal of the news at the network upfronts, Brady took the opportunity to take a thinly-veiled shot at the team he faced in his last two season openers… and also lost his final NFL game to.

The Browns went 11-6 in 2023 and won an impressive eight of the nine home games they played at their eponymous stadium on the shores of Lake Erie. They appeared in the wild card round of the AFC playoffs, losing to Houston.

This season will mark Cleveland’s fifth under head coach Kevin Stefanski, but the club has undergone several coaching changes during the offseason, including naming Ken Dorsey their new offensive coordinator.

Deshaun Watson returns as the starting quarterback following a shoulder injury last November, while running back Nick Chubb looks to come back from a major knee injury suffered in Week 2. Former Cowboys receiver Amari Cooper logged a career-best 1,250-yard season in 2023, his second with the Browns after being traded by Dallas.

The Cleveland defense is still anchored by five-time Pro Bowl defensive end Myles Garrett, who was named last season’s NFL Defensive Player of the Year, an award Cowboys edge rusher Micah Parsons was also up for.

The Browns were fairly active in free agency, signing such notables as running backs D’Onta Foreman and Nyheim Hines, linebacker Jordan Hicks, quarterback Jameis Winston, and kicker Cade York. They obtained wide receiver Jerry Jeudy in a trade with Denver.

While the the team did not have a first-round pick in this year’s draft, they did select Ohio State defensive tackle Michael Hall Jr. in the second round and took Michigan guard Zak Zinter in the third.

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ESPN ranks the Browns 12th in their post-free agency power rankings, just one spot behind Dallas.

But despite what should be a evenly-matched clash on the field, much of the hype around this game will nonetheless be based on the broadcast debut of Brady, who supplants Greg Olsen as the color analyst for Fox’s A-team and will sit alongside play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt.

“Obviously, having the Cowboys on is a huge draw as America’s Team. That’s going to get a little hard for me to say that all the time,” Brady told Michael Strahan during the reveal of the Week 1 matchup.

“In this new role, I know the Cowboys, how important they are to this network. They’ve got great storylines. Dak Prescott: let’s see if he can finally come through,” Brady joked, before cheekily adding to a snickering crowd, “Did that just slip out?”

The Cowboys will open the 2024 season on Sept. 8.

Story originally appeared on Cowboys Wire