Sports media outlets love promotional press releases with the same fervor Rick Blaine loved Ilsa Lund — and no sports property produces more promotional copy annually than the NFL. As a preview for the company’s coverage for Monday night’s matchup between the Cowboys and Buccaneers, ESPN sent out a release with more than 1,100 words highlighting the company descending upon Tampa for the NFC wild-card game. Game coverage ran over five platforms (ESPN, ABC, ESPN2, ESPN+ and ESPN Deportes), including an entertaining alternative broadcast featuring Peyton and Eli Manning. Then there was the armada of on-site studio shows live from Tampa Bay. The release even provided news of an exclusive new trailer debuting at halftime for Season 3 of “The Mandalorian.” We look forward to “Get Up with Grogu” in the distant future.
As part of its long-term rights agreement with the NFL, ABC/ESPN will carry Super Bowls in the 2026 and 2030 seasons. It will be the first time an ESPN-NFL agreement includes Super Bowl rights. (ABC last televised the Super Bowl in February 2006). The company also adds a divisional round game to its schedule along with its current wild-card game beginning in 2023.
So if you were looking for a mini-preview of how ESPN might cover a Super Bowl, Monday was a good place to start. At one point, I checked in on ESPN.com and was rewarded with a giant box promising “AIKMAN AND STEPHEN A. BREAK DOWN HOW BRADY CAN HURT THE COWBOYS.” By the time 2026 rolls around, I think you’ll see multiple alternate Super Bowl broadcasts on ESPN networks (assuming it hasn’t happened before) and what essentially amounts to a seven-day Super Bowl pregame show.
Monday’s game, alas, was not exactly a Monet unless you are a Cowboys diehard. Dallas rolled, 31-14, and the biggest drama centered around whether Cowboys kicker Brett Maher would finally make an extra point after missing four consecutive prior to the fourth quarter. But ESPN executives would clearly say the year was a success because the broadcast team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman provided what ESPN management desperately wanted — making “Monday Night Football” feel bigger and extinguishing the criticism its most important property has received (often through self -inflicted wounds).
That did not mean extra viewers. ESPN and ESPN2’s “Monday Night Football” telecasts averaged 13.419 million viewers in 2022, down five percent from last year (14.130 million), per Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal. As I hope you realize by now, viewership is dictated by matchups and the quality of games.
The MNF regular-season viewership numbers above do not include the abbreviated Jan. 2. broadcast, which I thought was the program’s best work of the season. The unprecedented scene of Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin collapsing on the field in a game against the Bengals prompted Buck, Aikman and reporter Lisa Salters into an unprecedented situation. All were careful never to speculate on the specifics of Hamlin’s prognosis and the trio was quick to understand the gravity of the situation. A successful Year 1 for this group.
The part about writing sports media that I’ve found particularly inconsequential over the last few years is evaluating the on-air performance of sports broadcasters. I’ve spent years talking to producers, directors and on-air talent, spending time in broadcast trucks, and I have an appreciation of the challenges of the job. Live television is not easy, even bad live television.
But the core of all of this is subjectivity. My opinion on performance has no more weight than yours.
That’s the precursor for offering some quick thoughts on NBC’s broadcast last Saturday of the Jaguars’ remarkable comeback over the Chargers. The broadcast stood out because Al Michaels and Tony Dungy were incredibly flat. It was a crazy, frenetic final quarter, but we didn’t get any feeling of that as viewers. The call of the game-winning kick was perplexingly understated. Someone such as Gus Johnson, a play-by-play broadcaster who can create his own momentum independent of his partner, would have been incredibly valuable on Saturday. I put the majority of the mood on Dungy, who is too low-key to be a game analyst from my perspective. This was also a very obvious case of two people who had not worked together this season.
Those who want to write Michaels off will not find an ally here. Having watched most of Amazon’s schedule, I don’t think Michaels has lost his enthusiasm or his broadcasting fastball. There were some games, as he discussed in this column last week, that were simply awful. Not much could have been done to rescue them. But if Michaels calls a playoff game for NBC next year, he will benefit from an analyst who brings a ton of energy and particularly one he’s worked with before.
Contrast the NBC game-winning call with Ian Eagle and Jason McCourty, who had the call for Westwood One Audio. And this call on Sunday night from NBC’s Mike Tirico was absolute sports poetry.
Some viewership numbers for NFL studio shows this season:
NBC’s “Football Night in America:” 7.24 million viewers, up one percent from last season.
“Fox NFL Sunday:” 4.542 million viewers, up two percent over 2021.
CBS’ “The NFL Today:” 3.345 million viewers, up eight percent over 2021.
ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown:” 1.240 million viewers, up seven percent over 2021.
“Fox NFL Kickoff:” 1.304 million viewers, up nine percent over 2021.
Note: All sports television numbers are up over the last two years thanks to out-of-home viewership.
On Saturday night in Jacksonville, Fred Gaudelli, the executive producer of NFL for NBC Sports and the executive producer of “Thursday Night Football” for Amazon, concluded one of the most remarkable NFL producing runs. The Jaguars’ win over the Chargers was his final game as a leading NFL producer. I asked him to forward his career numbers:
• 670 NFL games produced, including seven Super Bowls, 35 postseason games, 532 regular-season games, 85 preseason games, and 11 Pro Bowls.
• First game as a lead NFL producer: Aug. 5, 1990, for a preseason game in Tokyo between Denver and Seattle.
• First regular-season game as a lead NFL producer: Nov. 11, 1990, a 24-6 San Francisco win over Dallas.
• His most memorable game: Super Bowl XLIII (Pittsburgh vs. Arizona, Feb. 1, 2009): “Two seminal plays in Super Bowl history and our team covered them with precision — James Harrison’s 100-yard interception for a touchdown to end the first half and Ben Roethlisberger to Santonio Holmes with under a minute left in the game the corner of the end zone to win it,” Gaudelli said. “Larry Fitzgerald had an insane second half. It was John Madden’s last broadcast, although no one on our team had a clue.”
Gaudelli is not retiring. He will have oversight of the “Sunday Night Football” production and work on the SNF schedule with the league. He’ll also be onsite for a number of Amazon’s Thursday night games and have oversight of the TNF production.
Fox NFL analyst Greg Olsen’s excellent work this season continued in the Giants’ win over the Vikings.
this is perhaps the best halftime analysis I’ve ever heard by a color commentator pic.twitter.com/OI6MdoLJhD
— Josh Hermsmeyer (@friscojosh) January 15, 2023
Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video averaged 9.58 million viewers per game for its first season, via Nielsen. The company said those numbers jump to 11.3 million viewers when the Nielsen data is combined with Amazon’s internal first-party metrics. Those first-party metrics are not made public. The Athletic‘s Bill Shea did a deep dive on Amazon’s first-year viewership.
The Bengals-Bills game next week in Buffalo will be the third consecutive week that the team of Jim Nantz, Tony Romo and Tracy Wolfson have been assigned to a game in Buffalo.
Interesting behind-the-scenes look of the talk-back used by Fox NFL rules analyst Mike Pereira. By the way, “Rog” here is Pereira’s producer, Roger Ruth, and not Roger Goodell. Zee is produced by Richie Zyontz.
My magic box. Push the red button and I go on air. The middle four are people I’m in direct communication with. Forget the one on the right. It’s for emergency use only. Who are the middle four people? pic.twitter.com/DVw5KwmpeX
— Mike Pereira (@MikePereira) January 15, 2023
Sports pieces of note:
• Great piece. The Softer Side of the Bills Mafia. By Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated.
• Shaq and Kobe, $10K bets and Digger Phelps’ bagels: An oral history of New York’s hidden practical gem. By Joe Vardon of The Athletic.
• Flag football: This year, the Pro Bowl; up next, the Olympics? By Les Carpenter of The Washington Post.
• Inside the NFL, players divide over playing surfaces. By Jourdan Rodrigue and Daniel Popper of The Athletic.
• I Saw Horrific Things When I Played in the NFL. By Nate Jackson for The Atlantic.
Will any team sign Trevor Bauer despite the controversy he would bring? By Peter Abraham of The Boston Globe.
• Iranian chess referee spars with governing body over women’s solidarity. By Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber of Reuters.
• FIFA Trial Could Implicate Fox, a Major Player in Soccer. By Ken Bensinger of The New York Times.
• ‘The SNL of Sabermetrics’: How a group of message-board misfits changed baseball. By Rustin Dodd and Jayson Jenks of The Athletic.
Non-sports pieces of note:
• Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations. Nature Reviews Microbiology. By Hannah E. Davis, Lisa McCorkell, Julia Moore Vogel and Eric J. Topol.
• Vigilantes for views: The YouTube pranksters harassing suspected scam callers in India. By Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar of Rest of the World.
• Global News (Canada) spent months investigating COVID disinformation three years into the pandemic.
• The Dave Bautista Method. By Yang-Yi Goh of GQ.
• Documents Inquiry Puts Spotlight on Biden’s Frenetic Last Days as Vice President. By Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear of The New York Times.
• Inside Mastbaum High, a refuge for Philly kids at the epicenter of the opioid epidemic. By Kristen A. Graham of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
• Stuck With Santos. By Kimberly Wehle of The Bulwark.
• A school did not have an inclusive playground. Students stepped in to raise $300,000 to build one. By Steve Hartman of CBS News.
• A couple of weeks old but an amazing piece: The Mysterious Case of the Doctor Who Disappeared at Sea. By Michael Wilson of The New York Times.
• You want to read about a real hero? Read this on Adolfo Kaminsky.
(Photo of the Cowboys’ Dak Prescott and Buccaneers’ Tom Brady: Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)
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