There was a welcome slice of truth delivered by “Sunday Night Football” lead analyst Cris Collinsworth during an appearance in late August on “The Dan Patrick Show.” The show’s host asked Collinsworth an insightful question about where the coverage of the Cowboys will be this season versus the team’s actual performance.
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“If NBC has their choice, we would do 17 Dallas Cowboys games,” Collinsworth said. “I’m not kidding. It doesn’t even matter what their record is. They could be 4-6, we would take them. ‘You guys can take any game you want this week.’ ‘OK, we’ll take the Dallas Cowboys.’ It’s insanity, but it’s true. They draw the ratings.”
It’s not that absurd. The Cowboys, as always, will play in the NFL’s most prominent windows, including six scheduled prime-time slots and six weeks where they anchor Fox’s late afternoon Sunday window. They remain the league’s viewership driver, which has been the story for multiple generations of NFL fans. Perhaps the only network that would not be actively rooting for Dallas to do well is CBS given they have less Dallas inventory than Fox and the prime-time holders. But that goes out the window this year since CBS will air the Super Bowl. One can only imagine the viewership number with Dallas in Las Vegas in February.
This day is historic for NFL overreactions, so we will temper any long-term projections but, dear lord, the Cowboys looked phenomenal on Sunday night in a 40-0 rout of the New York Giants. They played fast, scored fast and their defense looked like the grandchild of the 1976 Pittsburgh Steelers. The rain pounding on NBC’s audio matched the pounding New York took in the swamps of New Jersey. The scary thing is the offense has room to grow.
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“I think the Cowboys can make a deep playoff run,” said “Football Night in America” analyst Rodney Harrison. “I don’t care what they say about Dak Prescott. He’s a great leader, he’s a really good player, and I love the changes they made on the offensive side, making Tony Pollard their lead back and adding Brandin Cooks. With that defense, I definitely believe they can make a long run.”
No viewer could blame Collinsworth and play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico for extolling how good Dallas looked. On the production end, NBC had a great sequence early in the first quarter where they showed a close-up of Giants quarterback Daniel Jones with all sorts of field debris on his face that led immediately into Cowboys safety Juanyeh Thomas blocking a field-goal attempt by Giants kicker Graham Gano. Dallas cornerback Noah Igbinoghene scooped up the rolling football and went 58 yards for a touchdown.
COWBOYS BLOCK THE FIELD GOAL FOR A TOUCHDOWN! #DallasCowboys
📺: @NBC and @Peacock pic.twitter.com/ZW5BOveUB8
— Sunday Night Football on NBC (@SNFonNBC) September 11, 2023
It was 16-0 early in the second quarter, 26-0 at halftime and 33-0 after the third quarter. It was some kind of show, unless you were a Giants fan or a Cowboys hater (of which there are many, which amps up television viewership — and content for places such as this one).
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We already know the NFL is a viewership machine every year. But it’s an interesting thought exercise to consider: What kind of viewership numbers will we see if Dallas is a legit juggernaut?
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Here are 12 additional media thoughts (we’ll have some more on Tuesday) from the first weekend of the NFL season:
2. ESPN’s Alex Smith looked very comfortable on the set of “Sunday NFL Countdown.” It’s not easy to get your point across on a crowded set, but Smith figured out ways to inject himself and bring something for the audience to think about. One example: As Tedy Bruschi and Rex Ryan were selling Aaron Rodgers embracing New York and the heavy buzz on the Jets, Smith offered something different for viewers to think about.
Said Smith: “I was with Aaron this summer, and I think he’s been incredibly re-energized and he’s embraced it for all the reasons we just said. … But there’s something that scares me though a little but with this Jets team. There’s a lot of noise surrounding them, more noise than I can ever remember, more noise than the Jets have ever had as far as expectations go. That does a funny thing to a team. I know Aaron is ready for it. The rest of this team, though, is still very young. How are they going to handle it? It kind of remains to be seen.”
It was an excellent debut as a regular cast member.
3. Each NFL season always brings a team or two that NFL schedule-makers predict will jump into the realm of nationally-televised darling. The Lions fit that paradigm in 2023. Detroit has five nationally televised games, including last Thursday’s kickoff game, which saw them defeat the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs and help deliver a monster viewership number. The Lions-Chiefs game averaged 26.8 million viewers, up 24 percent over Bills-Rams last year (21.7 million) and nearly matching Cowboys-Buccaneers from 2021 (which drew 26.9 million and featured the Cowboys and Tom Brady). It was the most-watched program on television since Super Bowl LVII last February. NBC said the game delivered its second-best NFL streaming audience ever with an average minute audience of 2.8 million viewers. The streaming number was up 60 percent from last year’s NFL kickoff game (1.7 million).
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4. Amazon Prime NFL play-by-play broadcaster Al Michaels has always loved sneaking in some sports betting info over the years when calling games. But he says he has no plans to push things further this season, even with the NFL having a bigger stake in gambling.
“At this moment, I could do that, but I don’t think I’m going to,” Michaels said. “It was a lot more fun being the rascal. When people perceive that the announcer was not supposed to make any reference, whether it was overt or covert in regard to the spread or the over/under, I had a lot of fun. Believe me, it was a lot more fun when, say, the score was 41-0 and I might say, ‘Folks, this game is not quite OVER.’ A lot of people would understand what I was saying. My feeling has always been the vast majority of the audience is not betting, and I have to serve them. There are entities on certain cable channels where the whole show is dedicated to all of the prop bets and the rest. I really miss the fun of being the rascal. Everybody can be irrational now.”
5. “The NFL Today” spent a lot of time on Sunday — not unexpectedly — pushing J.J. Watt in his debut with the network. Here’s a very pungent line from Watt about defending the quarterback sneak.
Defending against the Eagles' QB sneak is a *tough* job according to @JJWatt 😂 pic.twitter.com/eeW5E6hskG
— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) September 10, 2023
6. Nice work by Tony Paul of The Detroit News to track down NBC Sports “Sunday Night Football” broadcaster Mike Tirico for some context on Tirico’s choice of the word “asterisk” to describe Detroit’s 21-20 win over Kansas City on Thursday. Tirico’s use of the word was in relation to Kansas City not having Chris Jones and Travis Kelce.
If you are a Lions fan, of course you didn’t like that word, and I agree there’s no asterisks in professional sports. It wasn’t a great word choice by any means. But the broader context would show Tirico didn’t Lions-bash throughout the broadcast.
“If you have a problem with the word ‘asterisk,’ that’s a very legitimate complaint,” Tirico told The Detroit News. “However, it should be in context. If you want to take out the middle of the comment and make it the whole comment, then you don’t understand properly how to attribute things.”
7. It’s always interesting (at least to me) what the NFL Sunday morning pregame shows lead with for Week 1 of the season. A sampling:
NFL Network’s “GameDay Morning”: The league-owned network highlighted that it turns 20 years old on Nov. 4, 2023, and replayed a segment with actor-comedian Kevin Hart from 2021 knocking the Cowboys.
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ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown”: After introducing new cast member Smith and shouting out the retired Chris Mortensen, insider Adam Schefter highlighted Joe Burrow’s five-year extension worth up to $275 million and other league notes.
CBS’ “The NFL Today”: The show’s producers had Nate Burleson and new cast member Watt do a live walk-and-talk from the dressing room into the studio. That was followed by bro hugs and first-week storylines.
“Fox NFL Sunday”: An acknowledgment that the show is celebrating its 30th year and then thoughts on major storylines.
“Fox NFL Kickoff”: The show welcomed new cast member Julian Edelman. Said Edelman. with some amusement for his former team: “I’m just here to do my job. You guys know the Patriot motto.”
8. Artificial intelligence is going to impact NFL broadcasts over the next decade.
“We’ve talked a lot about A.I. in the offseason and leading into this year and how it can affect not only what we do in production, but how it can affect technologies that we use in the game,” said Amazon Prime “Thursday Night Football” lead producer Mark Teitelman. “We already know that the teams are using various forms of A.I. I would say it’s no different for us. You can already see on “Prime Vision” (an alternative broadcast heavy on data) how they use machine learning in how they predict what’s going to happen next. The machine learning has gotten really advanced, almost to the point where nine times out of 10 they can predict which linebackers are coming. The more we teach it, the more it learns. We are using some of that technology to power things that you may see on the air and things that you may not see directly on the air. It powers a lot of our research efforts and obviously some of our Next Gen stats that we use every single game.
“We have to be wide open about A.I. and really understand where it’s going. Luckily Amazon’s a technology company. It feeds right into everything they do. A lot of people are curious where A.I. goes in every single industry, but you can bet that machine learning and different types of intelligent systems are part of our show and they will continue to be for the foreseeable future.”
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9. I had an extended sit-down with Fox NFL analyst Greg Olsen in case you missed it.
10. One of the annual rites of the NFL schedule release is each network praising the NFL for its schedule. Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes, not. But good on CBS NFL broadcaster Jim Nantz to acknowledge that you are always going to get great games if you are the lead NFL team for the major partner networks.
“When you’re the lead broadcast team of CBS, Fox or NBC, you’re really never going to have a bad schedule,” Nantz says. “It’s almost impossible. We’re going to have a big game every single week. I think we’re going to have national windows for this crew 13 out of 18 weeks because we’re going to do two national games on Thanksgiving weekend. The reality is we’re doing national games all the time that are playing before massive audiences. We do nothing but big games. We’re wired to do that, we thrive off of that, and we’re honored to do them.”
The Nantz crew has a massive one coming up in Week 2 — Rodgers and the Jets at the Cowboys in the late doubleheader slot.
11. Here’s a look at the NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube via the multi-view option courtesy of SI’s Jimmy Traina:
WE HAVE MULTIVIEW!!! pic.twitter.com/9gf7nCdEIQ
— Jimmy Traina (@JimmyTraina) September 10, 2023
Additionally. Awful Announcing asksedits followers on social media how the experience was going early in the day.
12. My latest episode of the Sports Media Podcast features three guests together — Amazon Prime Video play-by-play broadcaster Al Michaels, Amazon lead game producer Mark Teitelman and Fred Gaudelli, the executive producer of NBC’s and Amazon Prime’s NFL coverage. Amazon’s first Thursday night broadcast features the Minnesota Vikings at the Philadelphia Eagles on Sept. 14 at 8:15 p.m. ET. In this podcast, the three discuss Teitelman taking over the lead producer role and a ton of other topics.
13. If you are not familiar with them: 506sports.com is the essential website when it comes to NFL (and college football) broadcast maps.
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(Photo of Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)
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