Thirteen media-centric thoughts, notes and takeaways off NFL divisional weekend:
1. Joe Buck’s oldest daughter is getting married in Mexico this week, so the ESPN broadcaster was understandably juggling quite a mental load when The Athletic reached him on Saturday night following his call of the Kansas City Chiefs’ win over the Houston Texans. But Buck was lucid about his partner, Troy Aikman, who had a great broadcast on Saturday and has been terrific all season. (From my perspective, the Buck-Aikman-Lisa Salters team was the best working NFL announcing group this season.)
“What makes me happy is I feel like Troy is finally getting his just due and credit for being how great he is and how hard he works at this job,” Buck said. “He had a fantastic year, and I’m so glad that he’s getting these accolades because it’s long overdue in my very biased opinion. I thought all of us had a great year, and I feel like we’ve gotten better over time, which is not easy to do.
“It’s such a weird subjective business and these things kind of come and go in waves. I’m happy ESPN took a chance on us, to spend the money that they spent. I think in many ways they are getting the best of Troy, the best of me, and the best of us.”
Aikman consistently offers criticism of NFL officiating when warranted — and that pointed criticism separates him from the rest of the top NFL game analysts. You always feel he’s working for viewers and not the league.
His best moment on Saturday came with 1:41 left in the third quarter when the officials called an unnecessary roughness penalty on Texans linebacker Henry To’oTo’o for a hit on Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. “Come on,” Aikman said. “I mean, he’s a runner. I could not disagree with that one more. He barely gets hit.” The whole sequence is here — and worth watching.
There’s an expression in sports — the players always know — and here’s former All-Pro offensive lineman Mitchell Schwartz on Aikman’s broadcasting work: “I think Aikman calls a great game. Most honest of all the analysts. And I don’t sense any personal animosity towards Pat (Mahomes) the way some think he has. I don’t believe he’s said anything wrong or out of pocket tonight.”
“Troy has won, lost, bled, sweated, and he’s earned his opinion,” Buck said. “And it’s never unfair. As long as it’s always fair then there’s room for it. It’s also needed. But it doesn’t matter the sport, it doesn’t matter the league, if it’s MLB, the NBA, the NHL, the NFL, if their main announcers are critical of officiating, it’s going to get their attention.
“His (Aikman’s) opinion carries a lot of weight and he knows that and the league knows that. You’re always trying to be as honest as you can but also knowing that you’re taking a check from a network that is heavily invested in a league. I think over time Troy has been more willing to go just with his gut on air instead of measuring every word. That’s what makes for great, honest TV.”
2. Ask any NFL television producer what they must have for a broadcast and many will say a clear and definitive image of the most important play of the game. CBS landed three great replays of the two-point conversion drop by Baltimore Ravens tight end Mark Andrews with 1:33 left, including a pylon camera image where you could make out the NFL logo on the football. A heartbreaking image for Ravens fans but a fantastic one for a television audience:
You gotta catch that all day – Tony Romo pic.twitter.com/KrJbYtDCzf
— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) January 20, 2025
3. Last month I wrote about the challenges a snow game creates for an NFL broadcast. On Sunday, NBC experienced fluffy snow swirling across Lincoln Financial Field in South Philly for the Eagles-Rams. It made for fantastic imagery, but it’s worth remembering that someone is freezing bringing you these images. Camera operators have to stand still in very cold conditions for hours with very limited opportunities for a break or to get warm.
Suzanne Smith, a longtime NFL director for CBS Sports, told me that some operators will use heated vests, blow dryers or dress in ski suits to try to fight the elements. The great images you saw from the Eagles–Rams game are because of production people such as these, whose names you will never know but make the NFL what it is.
“We knew it was going to snow at some point during the game, so we had a similar plan to what we had in place in Buffalo (on Dec. 1),” NBC Sports “Sunday Night Football” producer Rob Hyland said after the Eagles-Rams game.
“When the snow started coming down, the weather and the field conditions became a major factor. All of the pre-tape scenics were dumped, and the emphasis coming in and out of breaks was to show the scene. The camera crew did a great job of showcasing the live scene in Philly, and the tape room did a great job of making sure that we replayed anything that we missed live. It was such a special way to end an incredible season of ‘Sunday Night Football.’ I’m proud of our team.”
4. CBS Sports should open up a satellite office in Kansas City given how often they have been there in the postseason. Sunday’s AFC Championship Game will be the ninth time the network will air a Chiefs home playoff game since 2018, which was Patrick Mahomes’ first year as a starter. The list includes six AFC Championship Games (2018-2022 and 2024) and three divisional games (2019, 2020 and 2021). Last year’s game between the Chiefs and Ravens (that was in Baltimore) was the most-watched AFC Championship Game ever, drawing 55.5 million viewers.
5. This site has written a ton about Tom Brady over the last couple of weeks (guilty, as charged), from navigating his dual roles as Fox broadcaster and minority NFL owner to his improvement as a broadcaster. My colleague Andrew Marchand recently spoke with Brad Zager, the Fox Sports president of programming and production, who said it was “ridiculous” for anyone to question Brady over a perceived conflict of interest.
Zager cited conflicts in the sports media, and he is correct; conflicts are everywhere in sports media. They’ve also been written about a ton (for instance, here’s an SI piece from me way back in 2011 on conflicts in tennis broadcasting, a sport with an endless amount of media conflicts).
Owning a team and calling games as a supposed neutral observer is, of course, a conflict by definition, but that’s not the real issue with Brady, at least for me. Sports viewers deserve transparency, at a minimum, about the conflict when it arises. Transparency is the issue at hand because people watching the games deserve that.
6. Speaking of which: I do want to note that Fox play-by-play broadcaster Kevin Burkhardt and Brady spent 34 seconds (at least based on my stopwatch) during Saturday’s Commanders-Lions broadcast acknowledging that Brady was indeed part of the head coaching interviewing process for the Raiders, including interviews with Lions coordinators Aaron Glenn and Ben Johnson. It was hilariously brief and offered viewers absolutely zero insight, but it was acknowledged on air. My colleague Dan Shanoff offered his thoughts on Brady’s night calling the Commanders and Lions.
7. Brady had a great line in the third quarter of the Commanders-Lions game when discussing Washington quarterback Jayden Daniels: “When you are looking for the leader of a franchise when all else goes wrong, the quarterback can make people right.” That perfectly describes Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and all of the all-time best quarterbacks, including Brady.
8. Fox averaged 33.6 million viewers for Commanders-Lions on Saturday night. That is significantly down from last year’s Saturday night game in the divisional round (37.5 million viewers for 49ers–Packers on Fox).
9. Kirk Cousins is the latest active NFL player to join the set of an ESPN pregame show and like Fred Warner last week, Cousins showed he has a future in the profession if he wants it.
Asked about Arrowhead Stadium, Cousins delivered an answer you don’t often hear on an NFL program:
“I have a love-hate relationship with this place,” Cousins said. “I hate it because it’s loud and the opponent you are going against is iconic. But I love it because it is one of the few stadiums in the league that has not gone corporate. There is Lambeau Field, there’s Buffalo, and then there’s Arrowhead. Grass field, there’s not a bunch of suites, fans just give you that feel that you are at a really important, really big high school game. It goes back to the purity of why you love the game of football.”
Cousins also had a memorable line about Patrick Mahomes: “There’s times I watch Pat play, and it’s hard to believe we play the same position.”
Discussing Cousins as a broadcaster, ESPN vice president Seth Markman said: “I thought he was a natural. No question in my mind he will have a great career in broadcasting. Loved how many questions he asked about the process going into today. You’ll see him in a booth or a desk in a few years.”
10. For a league so tethered to sports gambling — all of sports media is these days — it’s very silly that NFL broadcasters cannot mention the specific spread of a game or an over-under as the game is concluding. Buck and Aikman did an amusing job of invoking the old Al Michaels there-is-no-gambling-in-Casablanca schtick during the last 15 seconds of the Chiefs-Texans game.
11. If you missed it: The Athletic’s Caoimhe O’Neil wrote a fantastic story on the London Bills Backers bar, where fans of the Buffalo Bills in the famed U.K. city meet at The Fitzrovia Belle on Tottenham Court Road in the West End of central London to watch the Bills play. The bar/hotel has played host to Western New Yorkers as well as British and international fans with an allegiance to Buffalo. The New York Times’ Ken Belson also wrote an interesting piece on long-suffering NFL fans in Canada.
12. One more fun anecdote from Joe Buck: He said he and his wife, ESPN reporter Michelle Beisner-Buck, were in the tunnel outside Kansas City’s locker room before the game when Taylor Swift and her group walked through. Buck said Scott Swift, Taylor’s father, handed him and Michelle some guitar picks from Swift. “Taylor was like, ‘Oh, my God, my dad loves giving these out,’” Buck said.
“It was just a sweet moment. I met her with my daughters years ago when she sang the anthem at the World Series. She and Caitlin Clark sat just below our booth, and Caitlin is a player and person I admire greatly, so to be able to rattle through just the tip of Caitlin’s resume on-air was cool.
“It’s a great scene at Arrowhead. It’s easy to do games there because the booth is so good. It’s wide open and close to the field. The place is just throbbing with energy. It just makes for great broadcasts.”
13. Classy move by Burkhardt and Fox sideline reporter Erin Andrews to come up with a creative way to raise money for people dealing with the horrible California wildfires. The broadcasters have raised nearly $100,000 by offering a unique fan experience.
“Erin and I live in LA and while we are both fortunate and our families are OK, looking out our door and seeing the black smoke-filled sky and smelling the fires just had us feeling helpless and sad,” Burkhardt said. “We wanted to find the best way to help those truly impacted, so we started talking with our (Fox Sports senior vice president) boss Jacob Ullman and (Red Cross senior director and former CAA agent) Becky Sendrow.
“We wanted to have donations go directly to the wildfire victims, and we talked about how we could raise the most money possible to do that. Our answer was to give away a game experience for next year to hang with us for the weekend. We were very sensitive about making it a ‘contest’ since the situation is so devastating. It just felt personal, so we are trying to use our platform to help, and I can’t thank everyone enough for donating with us and hope we can help some people who truly need it.” You can donate here.
(Photo by Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)
