The New England Patriots and Las Vegas Raiders will kick off their 2025 NFL schedules by facing each other for the 39th time, according to a report by NBC Sports Boston.
But Tom Brady, the legendary Patriots quarterback who now owns about five percent of the Raiders, is highly unlikely to attend the matchup at his old stomping grounds of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
The reason? Brady is in the second season of his 10-year, $375 million contract to serve as an in-game analyst for Fox Sports broadcasts. Despite buying into the Raiders last October, Brady has said that he plans to see that contract through to its conclusion.
The NFL has permitted Brady to work on Raiders broadcasts for Fox. But in his debut season he was not assigned to any Raiders games.
Brady Likely to be in Green Bay, Not New England
Given the awkwardness of a team’s owner, even a minority one, being put in the position of potentially criticizing players who work for him on a network broadcast, it appears unlikely that Brady will be assigned to be in the booth for Raiders games in 2025 either.
Even if they did place Brady in the booth for a Raiders broadcast, Week One might not be the ideal time to do it. It appears to be a certainty that Brady will be working for Fox in another city on Sunday, September 27, when the Patriots will host the Raiders at Gillette Stadium.
Fox has not announced its own broadcast schedule as of Wednesday afternoon, but a good guess at the featured matchup â which Brady would broadcast â would be the Detroit Lions visiting the Green Bay Packers.
Fox primarily, though not exclusively, covers NFC matchups. A clash between last season’s NFC North-winning Lions and their divisional rivals the Packers, one of football’s longest-standing, traditional franchises, would be hard for Fox to resist.
Though Brady will not be there, one former member of the Raiders organization who will is Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, who was fired as head coach in Las Vegas on October 31, 2023.
The NFL is set to release the full 2025 schedule â including all 17 games for all 32 teams, a total of 262 regular season matchups â starting at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. But select games have been announced in advance, as have the opponents that each team will face.
Patriots Get to Be Homebodies in 2025
Based on the list of opponents, which the NFL creates using specific criteria, fans of the New England Patriots already know two pieces of information that would give them cause for optimism.
Based on their opponents’ projected win totals for 2025, the Patriots will play the easiest schedule in the AFC, and second-easiest in the NFL. Only the San Francisco 49ers will take on a weaker set of foes in 2025.
Not only do the Patriots have a weak schedule, it has also been revealed that New England will be relatively unburdened by travel obligations. With no international games on their slate this season, the Patriots will travel fewer miles than any but four other NFL teams.
In fact, the Massachusetts-based team will not have to leave the Eastern time zone more than twice all season â and then only to travel to the Central time zone, just a one-hour shift of the clock.
The Patriots make zero west coast trips, avoiding the three-hour shift â nor do they travel to Denver in the Mountain zone, which is two hours behind Eastern time.
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