Terry Bradshaw has put a rough end date on the longest-running act in NFL studio television. “I realize my time on television as a sports broadcaster is coming to an end,” the 78-year-old Hall of Fame quarterback said in a television interview on Tuesday, October 13, the day his new memoir, Looking for Terry, went on sale.
He did not name a final show, and he framed the remark around a man who still likes his calendar full. Asked how he fills his days between a horse ranch, a bourbon label, grandchildren and the book tour, he answered: “I’m a workaholic; I love to work.” Then he recalled a line he credits to the evangelist Billy Graham: “The day you retire is the day you start dying.”
Four decades in the booth and at the desk
Bradshaw’s broadcasting career is now older than many of the players he talks about on Sundays. A quick sketch of how it got here:
- 1980 to 1982: while still the Pittsburgh Steelers’ starting quarterback, he worked as a guest commentator on CBS’s NFC playoff coverage.
- 1984: after an elbow injury ended a 14-season playing career, he retired that July and became a full-time CBS game analyst, working with play-by-play voice Verne Lundquist.
- 1990: CBS moved him into the studio for The NFL Today, which he co-hosted with Greg Gumbel through the 1993 season.
- 1994: Fox bought NFL rights and launched Fox NFL Sunday, and Bradshaw jumped networks. He and Howie Long are the only two people who have sat at that desk since the first episode.
- February 2025: at Super Bowl week in New Orleans he told reporters he had “two years left at Fox” and pointed to the network’s next Super Bowl as a natural stopping point.
Counting from 1984, the current 2026 season is his 43rd straight NFL season working for a national network, the last 33 of them for Fox. He has collected three Sports Emmy Awards as a studio analyst along the way.
Why the next Fox Super Bowl matters
US networks rotate the Super Bowl, so Fox does not carry the game every year. Its next one is Super Bowl LXIII, which closes the 2028 season in early 2029. Bradshaw was born on September 2, 1948, which means he turns 80 in September 2028 and would be 80 on that broadcast. That is the arithmetic behind the age he keeps citing. “If we can get to the next Super Bowl, I’ll be 80. I think that’s time,” he said in New Orleans.
He has also described extending his deal to reach that game. “I wanted to extend my contract. So I signed through the Super Bowl,” he said, adding that he still wants viewers to tune in and like what they see. Fox has not announced a farewell season, and Tuesday’s comments did not change the timetable he has already laid out; they mostly confirmed that he is thinking about it out loud.
The memoir behind the interview
Looking for Terry is his fifth book and the first in roughly 25 years, following the 2001 memoir It’s Only a Game. Much of it covers what he has faced since he stopped playing, including clinical depression and two cancer diagnoses. In 2022 he disclosed treatment for bladder cancer and for a Merkel cell tumor in his neck, and he has since said he is cancer-free.
On depression he was blunt: “I couldn’t understand why I had this horrible sinking feeling, and I was so miserable.” He said he hesitated to talk about it because “I didn’t want it to be taken lightly, and I didn’t want to be laughed at,” and argued that many men see the illness as weakness. “It’s a disease. It’s a disconnect,” he said.
The playing résumé is what got him the chair in the first place. He was the No. 1 pick in the 1970 draft, won four Super Bowls with Pittsburgh between the 1974 and 1979 seasons, took two Super Bowl MVP awards and the 1978 league MVP, and entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1989. No Steelers player has worn his No. 12 since he left.
For now, he is still on the Sunday schedule, and the finish line he named himself is a Super Bowl in early 2029, a little more than two years away.
Further reading
Image: Jim Greenhill from McLean, USA, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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