ESPN’s taste of Super Bowl plans, Al Michaels and Tony Dungey level off: NFL playoff media thoughts

ESPN’s taste of Super Bowl plans, Al Michaels and Tony Dungey level off: NFL playoff media thoughts

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The sports media loves promotional press releases with the same fervor that Rick Blaine loved Ilsa Lund. As a preview of the company’s coverage of Monday night’s Cowboys-Buccaneers matchup, ESPN sent out his 1,100+ word release highlighting that the company landed in Tampa for his NFC Wildcard game. Did. Game coverage was done on five platforms (ESPN, ABC, ESPN2, ESPN+, ESPN Deportes). funny alternative broadcast Starring Peyton and Eli Manning.Then there was a fleet of onsite studio shows live from Tampa Bay.I’m looking forward to “Get Up with Grogu” in the distant future.

As part of a long-term rights agreement with the NFL, ABC/ESPN will host the Super Bowl in the 2026 and 2030 seasons. This is the first time that ESPN and the NFL contract included Super Bowl rights. (He last aired the Super Bowl on ABC in February 2006). The company will also add divisional round games to its schedule, along with current wildcard games beginning in 2023.

So if you were looking for a mini preview of how ESPN will cover the Super Bowl, Monday was a good place to start. At one point, I checked into ESPN.com and was rewarded with a giant box promising “Aikman and Stephen A. Breakdown He’s How Brady Hurts The Cowboys.” By the time 2026 rolls around, I think we’ll see multiple alternate Super Bowl broadcasts on the ESPN network (assuming they’ve never happened before), essentially the equivalent of a seven-day Super Bowl pregame show. .

Unfortunately, Monday’s game wasn’t exactly Monét unless you’re a Cowboy die-hard. centered on. will make extra points at the end After four consecutive absences before the fourth quarter. But ESPN executives will definitely say this year was a success, as the broadcast team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman delivered what ESPN management desperately wanted. -inflicted wounds).

It meant no extra viewers. According to Sports Business Journal’s Austin Karp, his 2022 average viewership for ESPN and ESPN2’s “Monday Night Football” telecasts is down 5% from last year (14.13 million) to 13.419 million. was a person As you may have guessed by now, viewership is determined by match and game quality.

The MNF regular season viewership numbers above don’t include the shortened January 2nd broadcast, which I thought was the show’s best work of the season. In a game against the Bengals, the unprecedented scene of Buffalo’s safety Dummer Hamlin collapsing on the field put Buck, Aikman and reporter Lisa Salters in an unprecedented situation. All were careful never to speculate about the details of Hamlin’s prognosis, and the three quickly realized the gravity of the situation. A successful first year for this group.


A less important part of writing for sports media in recent years has been evaluating the on-air performance of sports broadcasters. Having spent years talking to producers, directors, on-air talent, and spending time in broadcast trucks, I understand the challenges of the job.

But at the heart of all this is subjectivity. My opinion on performance is not as important as yours.

It’s a precursor to NBC’s broadcast last Saturday that offers a few quick thoughts on the Jaguars’ remarkable comeback over the Chargers. The broadcast stood out because Al Michaels and Tony Dungey were incredibly flat.It was a crazy, frenzied final quarter, but as a viewer, I couldn’t feel it. embarrassingly modestA play-by-play broadcaster like Gus Johnson who could generate his own momentum independently of his partner would have been very valuable on Saturday. I was. Dungy is too modest and from my point of view the game he can’t be an analyst. This was also a very obvious case of the two not working together this season.

Those who want to put Michaels away will not find allies here.I’ve seen most of Amazon’s schedule, and I don’t think Michaels has lost his enthusiasm or broadcast fastball. As he discussed in this column last week, some games were simply awful. There wasn’t much you could do to save them. But if Michaels does make his game in the NBC playoffs next year, he’ll benefit from an energetic analyst, especially one he’s worked with before.

In contrast to NBC’s declaration of victory with Ian Eagle and Jason McCourty, I had a Westwood One Audio phone.When This Sunday night call from NBC’s Mike Tillico It was absolute sports poetry.


NFL Studio Show Viewerships This Season:

NBC’s “Football Night in America”: 7.24 million viewers, up 1% from last season.
“Fox NFL Sunday”: 4,542,000 viewers, up 2% from 2021.
CBS’s “The NFL Today:” reached 3.345 million viewers, an 8% increase from 2021.
ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown”: 1.24 million viewers, up 7% from 2021.
“Fox NFL Kickoff”: 1.304K viewers, up 9% from 2021.

Note: The number of all sports TV has increased in the last two years thanks to outdoor viewership.


Saturday night in Jacksonville, Fred Gaudelli, executive producer of the NFL for NBC Sports and executive producer of Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football,” wrapped up one of the most notable NFL producing runs. The Jaguars’ victory over the Chargers was Reed’s last game as an NFL producer. I asked him to forward his carrier number:

• 670 NFL games produced, including 7 Super Bowls, 35 postseason games, 532 regular season games, 85 preseason games, and 11 Pro Bowl games.
• First game as Lead NFL Producer: Aug. 5, 1990, preseason game between Denver and Seattle in Tokyo.
• First regular season game as lead NFL producer: November 11, 1990, San Francisco wins Dallas, 24-6.
• His most memorable game: Super Bowl XLIII (Pittsburgh vs. Arizona, Feb. 1, 2009: “Our team accurately covered two pivotal plays in Super Bowl history. James Harrison’s 100-yard interception for a touchdown ended the first half. And then an under play from Ben Roethlisberger to Santonio Holmes, with a minute left to win in a corner in the end zone,” Gaudelli said. “Larry Fitzgerald’s second half was insane. No one on our team had a clue, but it was John Madden’s last broadcast.

Gaudeli has not retired. He will oversee the production of ‘Sunday Night Football’ and work with the league on his SNF schedule. He also participates in many of his games on Amazon’s Thursday Nights and oversees the production of TNF.


Fox NFL analyst Greg Olsen’s stellar performance this season follows the Giants’ victory over the Vikings.


Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video averaged 9.58 million viewers per game in its first season via Nielsen. Combining Nielsen’s data with Amazon’s internal first-party metrics, the company says those numbers jump to his 11.3 million viewers. These first party metrics are not published. athletic‘s Bill Shea delves into Amazon’s first-year viewership numbers.


Next week’s Bengals-Bills game in Buffalo will be the third straight week that the team of Jim Nantz, Tony Romo and Tracy Wolfson have been assigned to play in Buffalo.


An interesting behind-the-scenes look at the talkback used by Fox NFL Rules Analyst Mike Pereira. By the way, “Rog” here is not Roger Goodell, but Pereira’s producer Roger Ruth. Zee is a producer and he is Richie Zyontz.


Sports notes:

• Works great. The soft side of Bill’s Mafia. By Steve Rushin for Sports Illustrated.

• Shaq and Kobe, $10,000 Bet, and Digger Phelps’ Bagels: An Oral History of New York’s Hidden Practice Gems.Joe Verdon athletic.

• Flag Football: Pro Bowl this year. Olympics next? By Les Carpenter for The Washington Post.

• Within the NFL, players are divided by playing surface. by Jourdan Rodrigue and Daniel Popper athletic.

• I’ve seen horrible things when I played in the NFL. By Nate Jackson of The Atlantic.

•. Will Any Team Sign Trevor Bauer Despite the Controversy Trevor Bauer Brings? By Peter Abraham of The Boston Globe.

• Iranian chess referees are at odds with organizations that control women’s solidarity. By Gabriel Tetro-Farber of Reuters.

• A FIFA trial could involve football giant Fox. By Ken Bensinger, The New York Times.

• “SNL on Sabermetrics”: How a group of billboard misfits changed baseball. By Rustin Dodd and Jayson Jenks athletic.

Non-Sports Notes:

• Long COVID: Key Findings, Mechanisms, and Recommendations. Nature Review Microbiology. By Hannah E. Davis, Lisa McCorkell, Julia Moore Vogel, Eric J. Topol.

• Vigilantes: YouTube pranksters harass suspected scam callers in India. By Andrew Deck and Laksha Kumar of Rest of the World.

• Global News (Canada) spent months investigating COVID disinformation three years after the pandemic.

• Dave Bautista Act. Yang Yi Go of GQ.

• Documents Inquiry shines a spotlight on Biden’s frenzied final days as Vice President. By Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear of The New York Times.

• Inside Mastbaum High School, a refuge for Philadelphia children at the epicenter of the opioid epidemic. By Kristen A. Graham of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

• Stuck in Santos. By Kimberly Wale of The Bulwark.

• The school did not have a comprehensive playground. Students raised his $300,000 and he built one. By Steve Hartman for CBS News.

• Great work from a few weeks ago: The mysterious case of the Doctor who disappeared into the sea. By Michael Wilson, The New York Times.

• Want to read about real heroes? Read this with Adolfo Kaminski.

(Photo of Cowboys’ Dak Prescott and Buccaneers’ Tom Brady: Julio Aguilar/Getty Images)



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