If you talk to enough game broadcasters — especially those who have formed successful partnerships — they will all tell you that the chemistry of a group is forged not on-air but during group dinners and activities away from a stadium or arena.
So how can you accomplish such a task in the middle of a pandemic? For play-by-play broadcaster Ian Eagle, game analyst Charles Davis and sideline reporter Evan Washburn — the No. 2 team at CBS that now features Davis in the role previously held by Dan Fouts — the arranged marriage has been helped by the most modern of communication tools:
Zoom.
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For 16 consecutive weeks prior to the NFL season, Eagle, Davis and Washburn would set up weekly Zoom meetings to get to know each other.
“Charles brought the idea up in April,” Eagle said. “He said if you have time would you mind jumping on a Zoom so we could get to know one another. I was like, ‘Charles, all I have is time right now.’ We did it every week for 16 straight weeks, 40-45 minutes a week. In a crazy, bizarre way we probably ended up getting closer together than we would be during a normal offseason because we looked forward to it every week. I’d say 90 percent of it was personal. And 10 percent was football.”
“Over the course of the Zoom it just got so intimate,” Washburn said. “I mean, we were talking family, Charles is sending me pictures of his dogs, I’m sending pictures of my black lab, my four-year-old son. So all of that led up to Week 1 and it was easy. The game was if we had been doing this for a while.”
I watched parts of the Ravens’ win over the Browns in Week 1 and was struck by how Eagle, Davis and Washburn already sounded in mid-season form. This week I spoke to the trio (via Zoom, of course) to get more on how this came to be. I also watched the group call the Bears’ 17-13 win over the Giants and there was such easy chemistry. One example: On a key play from the game — Chicago leading 10-0 late in the second quarter — here was the sequence:
Eagle: 24 seconds left. Bears holding on to a 10-0 lead over the Giants and Chicago with an opportunity to put points on the board before the break. This is a 3rd and 8.
Davis: And the Giants are daring them to run the football. They have all the big guys off the field. You are talking about a bunch of light, quick guys that they have out there and none of them go in a three-point stance. This is that Amoeba defense that (Bears coach) Matt Nagy was talking to us about.
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Eagle: There is no defensive linemen out there right now for New York. This is a 3rd and 8 for Chicago. … Trubisky… Steps up … Steps back … Trubisky will air it out … End zone … TOUCHDOWN! .. Makes the connection with (Darnell) Mooney! … Mitch Trubisky cashes in … And the Bears build on their lead.
Davis: Ian, two things struck me on this play. One, Mitchell Trubisky kept it alive with his movement, in the pocket and out. The second part, he trusts the rookie downfield from Tulane. That could essentially have been a 50-50 ball but he trusted the rookie to see him, and come back and make a play on the football ahead Corey Ballentine and that is exactly how it turned out.
Eagle: He beats the young corner Ballentine, Division II product from Washburn. Cairo Santos is on for the extra point. And that’s the point with Trubisky. Is it the prettiest ball?
Davis: No.
Eagle: Did it get there?
Davis: Yes. Look if it is going to get there for a touchdown you can throw it end over end. Coaches are going to buy it. But as a general rule, they want to see a tighter spiral when you throw it downfield for your receivers.
The conversation was so easy and both the description of the play and the explanation of why it happened was excellent. It’s also an example of prep and recognition and even some larger context of Trubisky.
The relationship between Davis and Eagle goes back nine years. The two broadcasters first met prior to Eagle calling the radio broadcast of Green Bay’s 48-21 playoff rout over Atlanta in Jan. 2011. Davis was working for Fox at the time and was also calling preseason games for the Falcons. They were introduced by a mutual friend, Fox Sports NFL sideline reporter Laura Okmin. “She introduced me to Ian that day and I left the booth and this will sound very made up but it’s absolutely true — you can check with Laura. I just said, ‘Boy, if I could ever work with Ian Eagle one day, I would be a lucky guy.’ Who knew that down the road that actually would come to fruition?
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Eagle deadpanned, “I have no recollection of that whatsoever” before continuing the recollection.
“I was an admirer of Charles’s work and Laura was working the game on Westwood One with me, “Eagle said. “She had told me prior to the game I really want you to meet somebody. I remember it was just outside the booth. We had literally five minutes to say hello and shake hands but it wasn’t just a quick back and forth. Charles isn’t that type of person. He has a smile on his face and always a positive disposition so you can’t help but feel something when you meet him. He leaves an impression on you. I remember saying to Laura later that day, ‘Wow, what a nice guy’ and she said, ‘he’s the best.’ When someone says that to you, that sticks with you for years.”
When he learned in early April that CBS was going to hire Davis to replace Fouts on his team, Eagle said he reached out to Davis.
“These are arranged marriages at this level, “Eagle said. “You don’t get to pick your analyst. You don’t get to pick your sideline reporter. You don’t get to pick your play-by-play guy. So when you get the word from for management, you process it and then you begin to think about the possibilities. So the first contact we had was early April. We’re in the middle of a pandemic and I reach out to Charles to first of all congratulate him and let him know how excited I am to work with him.”
Washburn said that he first met Davis virtually while hosting shows for Sirius XM NFL Radio. He and Davis did two shows together with Washburn working out of a studio in Washington D.C. while Davis was at his home in Orlando.
“These were shows in late January, on back to back Mondays,” Washburn said. “So we’re doing four hours of NFL-specific radio from two different locations. That’s a pretty easy and quick way to get to know one another, develop chemistry, be good teammates, be unselfish, recognize strengths and weaknesses. That was huge. That to me gave me a sense of comfort and excitement once he joined our crew.”
Davis has called football games since 1997 and spent the last three years on Fox’s second team with Kevin Burkhardt and Pam Oliver. He obviously has logged thousands of hours of sports television and reached the top of his profession given his high-profile assignments. Still, I was curious if Davis had any nerves in calling his first game for a new network.
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“You can put the word nervous in all caps,” Davis said. “I’m not going to shy away from it by any stretch. I was fortunate enough in college where at one point I took a Shakespeare class. He who must be calm must first put on the appearance of being calm. And that stayed with me because the butterflies had the iron wings. The why is very simple. One, my pride in my performance, I want to be good at what I do. I want to be a great teammate. I want to, for lack of a better term, justify CBS’s confidence and bringing me over. And the respect for this team and the person (Dan Fouts) who was in the job before me. That’s a Hall of Famer in every stretch of the imagination on the field, off the field, all of those things. This is where it gets difficult in our business when we’re replacing people and being replaced. This team has done it at the highest level for a long, long time.
“So what’s the new piece? What’s different? Oh, this guy,” Davis continued. “I love my father dearly, but he is one of the people that first focused on this. When I told him I was going to CBS, he was like what team? I told him and he said, ‘man, they’re really good.’ He said, ‘So you’ll be the only new piece?’ I said yeah. He said, ‘Well, if it goes wrong, that’s you.’ So all of those contributed to an anticipation and excitement with that nervousness.”
Eagle said he has worked with 138 different broadcast partners during his near-30 year career. He said that he knows within five minutes of being on-air with someone whether the arranged marriage is going to work.
“I know that’s a scary thing to say, but it’s like when you meet somebody for the first time and you know instantly that we are going to have a friendship,” Eagle said. “I just knew within the first few minutes of the game last week that it would work. If it didn’t feel that way, then maybe it would have felt more difficult. But all of this felt very easy and when it feels easy that usually means it’s working. You know in your gut if you have to really work at it to create chemistry or if it’s natural. And it felt natural from the moment Charles and I went on the air.”
Some additional Week 2 NFL notes:
- The networks that air the NFL should continue to tweak the audio level of the enhanced noise, particularly in end-of-game situations. CBS’s Jim Nantz and Tony Romo were fantastic on Kansas City’s game-tying drive in regulation against the Chargers but the audio was distracting. Loved that Romo called for the Chargers to go for it on a 4th and 1 at the L.A. 34 in overtime. And he was right.
- A terrific line from Fox NFL Sunday analyst Howie Long, who played for the Raiders from 1981 to 1993, on the new Las Vegas home of the Raiders. “I’m going to get biblical on you. It’s the only time I have done this in 27 years,. Typically you wander for 40 years in the desert before finding a home. In typical Raiders fashion, they wandered for 40 years and made their home in the desert.” Long also dropped some NBA knowledge on Sunday’s show: “The only thing that’s more egregious than (NBA’s) LeBron (James) only getting 16 votes for the MVP this season is Russell (Wilson) having never ever received a vote for the MVP.”
- What has changed for NFL play-by-play broadcasters in 2020? Eagle said time management is very different on the road. “My reality more or less is isolation in my room and using my time constructively and wisely and maybe adjusting some of the things I do (in preparation) during the week,” Eagle said. “So doing more of them on a Friday and Saturday as opposed to a Wednesday or Thursday because I know I’m going to have time in my room.”
- The first viewership marker of Week 2 is already in. The Browns’ 35-30 win over the Bengals — the first Thursday Night game of the season — averaged 6.68 million viewers on NFL Network. Last year’s opener for Thursday Night Football — the Bucs and Panthers — averaged 6.67 million viewers. When streaming was added the NFL said total viewership was 7.2 million viewers (TV + Digital). That was up 3 percent versus last year’s Week 2 TNF (Bucs-Panthers (7.0 million).
- Per Anthony Crupi of Sportico: The NFL’s four Sunday broadcast windows on opening weekend (CBS and Fox’s 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. games) averaged 18 million viewers, a 3 percent decline compared to the first Sunday in 2019. The Cowboys-Rams broadcast for Sunday Night Football was ugly for NBC and the NFL. The game averaged 18.9 million TV viewers, down 15 percent compared to last season’s Steelers-Patriots game (22.2 million). (It is a particularly bad number given the Cowboys.) Crupi, one of the best in the business for viewership data, has an excellent article on the Week 1 numbers.
- Per Austin Karp of Sports Business Daily: The seven national game windows (which includes five Sunday windows and the two Monday night games) averaged 15.8 million viewers for the first week. That was down 9 percent from 17.3 million last year.
- Per Fox Sports executive vice president Michael Mulvihill: With the inclusion of Nielsen’s Digital TV Ratings, which comes out three days after the national TV ratings, the final viewership number for FOX’s Week 1 doubleheader (which featured Bucs-Saints) was up 10 percent versus 2019 and an average of over 20 million viewers.
- The NFL Today analyst Phil Simms is all in on Giants quarterback Daniel Jones.
"I have no question in my mind, this guy is a franchise quarterback and the Giants are lucky to have him." – @PhilSimmsQB on Daniel Jones pic.twitter.com/xmdblTpsG5
— NFLonCBS (@NFLonCBS) September 20, 2020
- Technical delays all over the place in Week 2, which reminds you of the unprecedented conditions the short-staffed operations teams are working under right now. During the second quarter of the Pittsburgh-Denver game, viewers heard Rich Gannon’s voice repeat “out there on the corner” seven times on a play. “I think Week 2 is the week of the technical difficulties,” deadpanned Greg Gumbel.
- CBS said there was a quadrant of the stadium in Miami that lost power that impacted its television trucks. That forced the Bills-Dolphins game off air for 20 minutes. CBS went to Pittsburgh-Denver until the power in the trucks was restored.
- A lesson for all of us: Those that cover sports would be wise to avoid using a positive COVID test as part of a tease to hype an upcoming story as ESPN’s Adam Schefter did here.
- Washburn has Eagle and Davis in his ear for the entire game and will talk to them often during breaks. Viewers honestly have no idea how often an NFL sideline reporter will provide info for the broadcast booth that never gets credited to the sideline reporter. That’s true for all networks. One thing Washburn said that is significantly different for him is working out logistics with coaches and players for interviews. “Logistically a lot more is on my plate such as figuring out early in the week if this a coach that wants to talk to me on the phone going in at half,” Washburn said. “Matt Nagy, for example, is a guy that’s going to meet me at the top of a tunnel. Some of the things you just took for granted when everything was copacetic on the field, I have to make sure I have it buttoned up basically on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Are we doing headsets for interviews? Are they a headset team? Are they a team that wants to do it via a speaker or a standup mic. Who’s my contact on injuries? Is it somebody that’s going to come meet me? Is it a closed-end stadium? Those are the questions I have to navigate.”
The Ink Report
1. Episode 113 of the Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch features three guests. First up is John Ourand, the media reporter for Sports Business Daily. He is followed by writer Seyward Darby, the author of “Sisters In Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism” and writer Corey Sobel, the author of “The Redshirt,” selected for the 2020 Long List of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Darby and Sobel are married.
In this podcast Ourand discusses the seven-game windows for the NFL to start the season, which averaged 15.8 million viewers and was down 9 percent from 17.3 million last year; the mega-viewership for Fox national window, which drew 25.8 million for Bucs-Saints and was the most-watched Week 1 game for Fox in four years; NFL viewership issues in New York and L.A.; what we expect from the Las Vegas market this year as a ratings play; the Big Ten consulting with network partners such as Fox and ESPN before making its decision to play football this fall; whether ESPN and Fox will cover COVID issues during a broadcast; the Eagles and Fox Bet signing a multiyear sponsorship deal and ESPN’s deals with Caesars Entertainment, William Hill U.S. and DraftKings; the Peacock streaming service; how PR departments deal with the politicization of their numbers.
Darby and Sobel discuss their books, and how they found the current climate to sell a book; Darby’s examination of women as driving engines of white supremacist hatred; what inspired Sobel to write a fictional novel about college football players; Darby on whether hate has increased or whether our awareness to hate has increased; Sobel on college football being played this year; where Darby’s optimism lies when it comes to hatred in America; what is next for both.
You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and more.
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2. Asked about analyst Mike Milbury’s future and the replacing him during the Stanley Cup postseason, NBC Sports executive producer Sam Flood declined to answer the question. “I’m not going to get into that right now,” said Flood. “ I’m going to talk about the people who are working the Stanley Cup Final, and I’ll say Patrick Sharp has stepped up, Anson Carter is doing an incredible job, and Keith Jones continues to be the standard-bearer for us. That’s our focus right now.”
2a. Welcome to the new world: Sirius XM golf reporter, Fred Albers, called the U.S. Open Championships this week remotely from his home in El Paso, Texas. Sirius said Albers had video feeds that allowed him to provide play-by-play calls for shots. For Sirius’s coverage: Hosts Taylor Zarzour, analyst Michael Breed and reporters John Maginnes and Carl Paulson were onsite at Winged Foot. The other members of the broadcast team utilized remote studio set-ups and video feeds to call the tournament. I listened to some of the broadcast on Sunday. They were excellent.
2b. ESPN announced that Vince Carter has signed a multi-year deal to work as an NBA and college basketball analyst. He will appear on “NBA Countdown,” “The Jump,” “Get Up,” “First Take” and “SportsCenter” with special appearances on “College GameDay’s” basketball addition. He’ll also appear as a game analyst for both NBA and ACC men’s basketball games.
2c. A really interesting chart from Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics comparing Monday Night Football vs. WWE Raw since 2015.
WWE Raw this week held up against the first week of Monday Night Football better than it did in some recent years.
Notice too opening night of MNF since 2015 has fallen 34% (42% in demo), Raw over the same time period has fallen 50% (56% in demo). pic.twitter.com/PoyFMDmKDn
— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) September 16, 2020
3. Sports pieces of note
Non-sports pieces of note:
- The True Story of the Married Woman Who Smuggled Her Boyfriend Out of Prison in a Dog Crate. By Michael J. Mooney of The Atlantic.
- The Falwells, the pool attendant and the double life that brought them all down.
- Via Buzzfeed. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network files.
- How the Black Vote Became a Monolith. By Theodore R. Johnson.
- Via The Washington Post: Federal officials stockpiled munitions, sought ‘heat ray’ device before clearing Lafayette Square, whistleblower says.
- Via Jesse Barron of New York Times Magazine. What Happened Inside Ed Buck’s Apartment?
- Via The Wall Street Journal. Anthony Fauci on What It Will Take to Put Covid-19 Behind Us.
- Via Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post: A neighbor asked for a tomato. This is where the story gets weird.
- The Man Who Refused to Spy. By Laura Secor for The New Yorker.
- The Ivy League dominates this year’s Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings. But the future of U.S. universities has never been murkier. By David M. Ewalt of The Wall Street Journal.
- Via NPR’s Nina Totenberg: A 5-Decade-Long Friendship That Began With A Phone Call.
- New York Magazine’s Irin Carmen, who co-wrote a book with Shana Knizhnik on Ruth Bader Ginsberg, on the death of the Justice.
- How ‘Goodfellas’ and the Gangster Class of 1990 Changed Hollywood. By Jason Bailey of The New York Times.
(Photo courtesy of CBS)
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