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Stephen A. reacts to BABY First Take

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Stephen A. Smith just got turned into a baby, and he still won’t shut up about Tom Brady.

On March 19, 2020, ESPN’s First Take released a supercut that took a straight-faced roster breakdown and ran it through a Snapchat-style “baby filter,” turning Stephen A. Smith, Max Kellerman, and Marcus Spears into squeaky-voiced, wide-eyed infants mid-argument. The bit lifted footage from the crew’s March 18 discussion of Tom Brady leaving the New England Patriots for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, layering the digital distortion over a genuinely serious segment. Smith posted the clip himself that same night, saying he “can’t stop laughing” at watching his own on-air intensity get filtered into cartoon-baby form.

• The “Baby First Take” clip applies a digital infant filter — squeaky voices, oversized features — to the crew’s March 18 segment on Tom Brady’s move from the Patriots to the Buccaneers.
• Stephen A. Smith, Max Kellerman, and Marcus Spears were broadcasting remotely from their homes at the time, part of ESPN’s shift to social-distancing production once COVID-19 shut down live sports.
• Smith shared the clip on Twitter on March 18, 2020, calling it something he “can’t stop laughing” at.

The Origins of the Bit

The filter didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a callback to a trend that started organically in late 2019, when fans began slapping baby lenses over clips of Smith’s most explosive rants for laughs. This time, ESPN’s own production side leaned into the joke officially, applying the effect to a full NFL analysis segment rather than a random outburst. The comedy comes from the contrast: Spears is still breaking down personnel fit, Kellerman is still needling Smith’s take, and Smith is still going full volume — just with a pitch-shifted, high-pitched infant voice and an enlarged digital baby face doing the talking.

Stephen A. Smith on the clip: he “can’t stop laughing” at himself as a baby arguing about Tom Brady.

The Real Debate Underneath the Filter

Strip away the infant faces and squeaky audio, and what’s left is a legitimate breakdown of one of the biggest offseason moves in recent NFL memory: Brady, after two decades in New England, signing with Tampa Bay. Spears used his segment to dig into how Brady would actually fit into the Buccaneers’ roster — the receivers already on hand, the shift to the NFC South, and what a 42-year-old quarterback walking away from Bill Belichick’s system meant for both franchises. The debate style was pure First Take: loud, combative, unrelenting — just rendered absurd by the baby overlay sitting on top of it.

Comic Relief During a Sports Shutdown

The timing matters. By mid-March 2020, the NBA had suspended its season, MLB had delayed the start of its regular season, and most of the sports calendar had gone dark because of the pandemic. ESPN moved First Take to remote production out of Smith’s, Kellerman’s, and Spears’s respective homes to keep the show running under social distancing rules. With no live games to argue over, the Brady-to-Tampa story was one of the few real storylines left to chew on — and turning the segment into a baby-filtered supercut gave the crew, and the audience, something to laugh at during a genuinely bleak stretch for live sports.

The Brady debate itself didn’t need the filter to be entertaining — Spears, Kellerman, and Smith were already going at it hard over how a 42-year-old future Hall of Famer fits a Bucs offense that still needed answers at receiver depth and offensive line protection. The baby faces just made sure people who weren’t ready to watch serious NFL analysis in the middle of a pandemic clicked play anyway.