The Press Box - Joe Buck to ESPN, Quarterback Media Transactions, 'Broadcast News,' and a Tribute to Brent Renaud

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Bryan and David address the news that Joe Buck will also be leaving Fox to join Troy Aikman at ESPN. (0:26) Then, they weigh in on media involvement surrounding player communications and breaking news, from Aaron Rodgers staying in Green Bay to Russell Wilson being traded to the Broncos (29:10). Later, they pay tribute to journalist and filmmaker Brent Renaud who was killed in Ukraine as well as actor William Hurt, who starred in 'Broadcast News.' Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, many consumers. Welcome to the press box, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the ringer here along with our producer Erica Servantes. David, I know this is going to shock you, but we had more sports broadcasting news. late last week.

Andrew Marchand in the New York Post reported on Friday that Joe Buck is going from Fox to ESPN, following in the path of Troy Aikman, his partner of 20 years, who made the jump last week. Over at the athletic, Richard Deich has the contract numbers. Aikman's deal, he writes, will be $92.5 million over five years. that's 18.5 million per and Buck's deal will be 75 million over five years or thereabouts that's 15 million per

plus the opportunity to produce some stuff in the ESPN universe I'm still a little bit in shock even if we could see where this thing was headed what do you make of now Buck and Troy Aikman leaving Fox for ESPN well it makes sense

to the day'd be going as a package deal. I think that they probably, for all the reasons that they're great, I think they're probably both wise enough to know that there's a lot of greatness inherent in the partnership. And, you know, when you're making that kind of money,

you probably are, you know, don't want to waste your time being called out on how you weren't as good as you used to be, or at least you want to minimize that sort of thing. You know, the money seems just absolutely wacky. although I did the, I mean, did the math literally on a napkin when this thing came down and it looks like we're talking about the total of about $2 million a game for the pair, which is still a crazy amount of money, but makes it seem a little bit more reasonable.

When you talk, I mean, especially when you know that like there are famous actors getting paid a million plus per episode, that sort of thing, you know, I mean, for a TV show. you know, it starts to be a little bit closer to something you can wrap your head around. And I think that like we talked about before, Monday Night Football has been an institution sort of in search of legitimacy for the longest time. And if nothing else, it gives me the legitimacy. It also solves the problem of trying, of the sort of existing character of Monday Night Football for all of the, everybody they've hired over the past 20 years. has been seen as a sort of square peg in a round hole trying to fit into some preconceived notion of what the color commentator or announcer or third person in the booth should be.

And this just sort of tosses all those issues out the window. Not that Buck and Aikman fit into the holes that people were expecting, but because, you know, they're sort of so we're generous, you know, it's like they are who they are and we're not expecting them to crack wise or anything. It's funny because we now have the cut and paste sentence that we must put in any segment about paying lots of money to announcers, which is announcers do not bring viewers to a football game like Monday Night Football on their own.

They may make it sound better, but they don't bring viewers by themselves. But I think one interesting way to think of this is that ESPN, even though they just paid a boatload of money to the NFL to renew Monday Night Football and get a Super Bowl five years down the line, which Joe and Troy will now be calling, you can think of them still negotiating with the NFL at this point.

Because every year, the NFL is going to make out the Monday night schedule. And Monday night might be like the fourth best game of the week behind the two network Sunday games and Sunday night football. But it doesn't have to be. And I would also say even if it's the fourth best game of the week, there's a big difference between kind of a low-key division matchup and Jaguars Bear. you know, a game that just doesn't make any sense and doesn't have any viewership to it. Yeah. And so you get Joe and Troy and you are negotiating with the NFL to say, we like those Monday games, even if they're going to be fourth best a lot of weeks,

we want them to be as good as we can. And that does get viewers potentially into the door. So no, Joe and Troy on their own won't do that. nobody can do that. But when combined with maybe better scheduling, more negotiating leverage with the NFL, hey, maybe you can accomplish something like that. Yeah. And you know what?

I think for unlike just about any other NFL game, I think that there might be wiggle room to take exception to your premise on this. Because I think that since the advent of Sunday night football and also Thursday, Thursday night football if you want to throw that in as well. I think that the kind of mid card of viewers, you know, like the big, like the non-diehard fans are in general pretty perplexed

about what Monday Night Football is supposed to be, you know? And I think that it would be really easy to turn that on in week four and see, you know, fill in the blank mediocre teams playing with announcers that you can't quite pick out by their voice and think this is not a necessary game to watch. Like this is, this is, this is like, this is basically like watching the D-League and the NBA, you know,

this is, this is like such an unnecessary, such an unnecessary game. And I think that if there was, if there's an opportunity to change that perception based on five seconds of viewing, you know, Troy and, and Joe are the people who are going to at least make you pause and watch and reconsider. or help you answer that question in your head, right? I mean, listen, Monday night football is on average. You're going to be way better than your average than, you know, your mean, you know, one o'clock Sunday game.

But it's not football Sunday, you know, and there's not multiple games to watch at the same time and to throw it out there on its own. You're right. They need better games. Hopefully this will give them leverage to get better games. But I do think that there's a potential that it'll, that they can make it seem like a more legitimate game too. What you're talking about is almost like a sublimat.

cue to the viewer. Yeah. That this is big time. Well, it's not, yes. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a, the Pavlovian response we've been trained for for the past 50 years or whatever, I guess less than that. But like, you know the difference between a big Fox game and a not big Fox game. And it's the presence of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, right?

You don't have to like, I mean, it's, you know it when you turn on the game and you hear who's calling the game. You know if this is supposed to be the game of the week, right? I mean, it's very, it's like very straightforward in the way that they program. And so to hear those voices on Monday night will probably get your mouth watering in the same way. So 20 years, we've been hearing Joe and Troy call big games, not every week, but the biggest games, Super Bowl,

NFC championship game. So when we hear them in a different context, part of our brain, even if the Jacksonville Jaguars are involved, is going to say big game, or something I should pay attention to. Yeah. And not just flip pass.

I think that makes a ton of sense. I mean, there's also a very basic thing where it's like if this is much less, But if this is worth Joe Buck and Troy Aikman's time, then I guess that could be worth my time. You know, these are people who aren't familiar with. They're getting paid lots of money. But, like, presumably they wouldn't be calling like a high school football game just for a paycheck. Maybe.

Maybe if it was $2 million a game. Mm-hmm. I think what is so hard to process for me about this. And again, we're all so savvy now. We all read the New York Post stuff. We read the athletic. We read everything. So we said, well, oh, we knew that this was happening.

we knew this was in the works or could be happening. If we can just step back for a second to like six months ago, a year ago, what's so shocking about Joe Buck walking out the door is he is the face of Fox Sports. We could put some other stuff on the podium, right? Madden and Summer all back in the day, Terry, Jimmy, and Howie, the glowing hockey puck, Cletus, the robot, we could name all kinds of things. but Joe Buck, in a sense, is their greatest success story. We've talked about this before, but 1994, he is calling St. Louis Cardinals games.

He was 23 years old, if I have my math correct. 23 years old. His dad, of course, was longtime Cardinals announcer and had had a run on network television. And Joe's mom, who is social friends with the wife of a. Fox executive literally gives a VHS tape to her friend and says, you should watch this because my son is a really good announcer. A VHS tape, unbeknownst to Joe and unbeknownst to Joe's dad, both of whom would probably have rejected the strategy completely out of a way.

Like, please don't do that. But this tape is passed along and Joe Buck in spring of 1994 gets a call at Cardinal Spring Training that says, please come audition for a job calling football games at Fox. The one hitch here, David, was Joe Buck had never called a football game. Wow. Period. Ever.

I believe he, I mean, maybe there's a high school one we could find in his past, but I'm pretty sure he's told me in the past he had never called a football game at all. So he has to sit down with his dad at spring training, pop in another VHS tape of a football game. And his dad has to sit there and teach him how to announce a football game. game over the course of like an hour. This is how you do it. His dad had done the NFL on, you know,

network for years, was doing Monday night football on the radio. And he's like, here's how much you talk. Here's how much you don't talk. You're used to baseball, right? Oh my gosh. I once,

totally unrelated. I once talked to a wrestling announcer, an American wrestling announcer who called an early broadcast of Japanese wrestling, early, I mean, is in the modern era, not like early in the world history. It called a broadcast of Japanese wrestling before. It was real as big as it is now in wrestling audiences.

And I was like, how did you do? How did you like get the names? How did you get the names of the moves? Like, what's the process? And he was just like, I blocked off about two weeks. And every night I just got real high and watched a lot of videotape with it. Somebody had made him a binder, I guess, of reference stuff. But that was pretty much it.

It was two weeks of evenings and some medicinal help. guess this is a totally different thing. This is how these things to learn, though. Everybody has their own technique, right? And Joe, after that training session, flew to L.A. and did an audition. And they said, we're going to offer you a job as a Fox NFL announcer. And he told me years ago, like, he went home and he'd never seen his dad so proud. It said, like, Dad, I just got a job.

I'm, you're going to be 23, about to be 24, and I'm going to be calling national NFL games on this channel that just got the NFL. He gets a World Series, I believe, or gets baseball in 96. I think he calls his first World Series when he's 27. And when Madden moves on and Summerall kind of gets demoted, he becomes the number one NFL announcer a couple years later, I think so, 2002, 8 years later. And he has been there for the better part of 30 years,

calling just about every single World Series, every few Super Bowls, every single NFC championship game during that period. I mean, he's flags. Can I ask you a question? Sure. You've interviewed him a few times, yeah? I have.

To what, how Joe Bucky is Joe Buck in real life? Like, is the voice, is the voice a put on? Does he answer the phone? And he's just like, like, hello Brian Curtis. Like, what is the, like, how does the, what level are we, What, what, like, volume knob level are we dealing with here?

That's a good question, because every announcer, I think, is slightly enhanced for television. But Joe Buck, you know, being the son of an announcer, I think probably adds to the mystique a little bit. He sounds like an announcing robot, right? It sounds like if you created a computer to, you know, an AI, to be a sports announcer, it would probably sound like Joe Buck, and you would probably say that's a little bit too on the nose. This is what I think is interesting about him. Early on in his career at Fox, he made it sound so easy. Yeah.

Because he so naturally sounded like an announcer that I think it was almost unnerving to people. Yeah. Uncanny Valley of announcer voice. Yeah. And it was almost like this guy, I think people had the wrong idea that he wasn't working hard or trying hard. And I've talked to him about this too over the years. Like it was almost this idea that like this guy. son of an announcer. He's walking into the booth. He's just, you know, he just, it's just,

you know, he doesn't care. Of course, he had that Randy Moss thing in like 2005 that people decide to hold over his head for the next decade, even though he never acted like that. But I feel in the last, I don't know, in earnest anyway, in the last like five, seven years, something like that, he really has loosened up in the booth. And he is, he is Joe Buck the person in the booth. If there was ever a difference between those two things, he got to this place where he's like, I'm just going to let a rip and be myself. I'm not going to try to be an announcer. I mean, there was a time early in his career at Fox where he replaced Pat Summerall and he has said this, decided to try to sound like Pat Summerall. Like there's this old famous game where Brian Mitchell, remember the old

kick returner gets the kick and you hear Buck going, Mitchell, Mitchell, Mitchell. Mitchell. And he really just sounds like Pat. And he was doing Pat. But now he's doing Buck. And people, I feel, you know, in earnest again, five years ago, something like that really started to be like, we like this guy. You know, taking shots at Joe Buck is no longer a national pastime. Like, this dude's good. And, you know, he's, and a lot of people would tell you, he's the best, right?

Like, he's the best NFL announcer, which is interesting, right? because I felt Troy had his own mini arc like that. Remember Troy five years ago? Yeah. That first year of Romo? Yeah. We did a survey where would Troy have placed with Romo Collinsworth Troy as the three big NFL announcers? Oh, dead last, yeah.

And now he got really salty right on those Thursday night games, partly because those games were the even more of a poo-poo platter than the Monday night games. He and Bug kind of treated it like a roast. Yeah. And he let her rip and people are like, I like that guy. He's honest. Romo is cooing over these quarterbacks. That guy tells it like it is. And I think they got to a place where it's like, this is the most authentic announcing team.

These are the guys who feel like, you know, announcing is always going to be a little bit artificial, right? Yeah. If you're aiming for perfection, there's a little robotic quality. I think people would say, I certainly would say those are the two guys. Well, Alan Chris, I guess. But those are two guys that sound as close to their actual selves, as close to what they actually think during a game as anybody does right now. Yeah, I think that's right. You know, you can nitpick in just about every different direction there.

But yeah, I think that there's definitely their performance this year was a lot different than like you said a few years ago. I'm part of it is, I don't, I mean, maybe it's just my media intake. It seems like Troy was a little bit more out there. I mean, like a little bit more doing interviews, doing podcasts. He was just a little bit more present in this off season, this past off season and into the beginning of the season. And I wonder if some of that was just sort of, I mean, there were no bad media hits that he did. But I wonder if it was just sort of like listening to the questions that people asked him and sort of like digesting what people's perception of him was a little bit. You know?

I think he's always been hard to get a read on. Like you and I, of all people know, Troy Aikman, Dallas. Cowboys quarterback. Sure. Extremely well. He won three Super Bowls during our four years of high school in Dallas,

Fort Worth. So we were just, you know, hit over the head with Troy Aikman. I mean, I've had no player I liked as much more as Troy Ackman in my childhood.

But I feel like there was a little bit of him that just was a little bit of a cipher to people, like his just what he thought about stuff. I mean, he was like a, I'm trying to think of the right movie. It was sort of a little like Randy Quaid in any given Sunday or something

where like every member of the cast had such an outsized personality that the bit was almost that Troy was just sitting their stone face so everybody else was like jumping in front of the camera and doing funny faces or whatever. You know, like there was so little...

I mean, and again, those personality, that sort of out, the kind of comedic, like, you know, mugging for the camera personality is not really a real personality either necessarily, but there was so... you could read so much into everybody else on the team, including the coach, the coaches,

the owner, uh, and all of the big name teammates that Troy really never, like his, his lack of humanity in those days was sort of the gag, right? But like, I mean,

that was like the biggest thing he had going for him or that was the way, the biggest way he was perceived. But yeah, it's, uh, he was more contained. He was right. Yeah.

Yeah. And he'd probably tell you like, look, somebody had to keep a straight face when Barry Switzer was the coach of the cowboys, because otherwise, that thing was just going to fly into the sun and eventually

did. And by the way, I would say the same thing about Eggman in the universe of Fox Sports. This is the world, dude, of Terry Bradshaw chewing scenery on the pregame show. John frickin' men. We mentioned

Cletus, the robot, all these like bells and whistles. And there's Troy who is, I think again, in that universe or was more buttoned down. but over the last few years has really let a rip and let people I think see more of his personality and people like that.

We have mentioned on this podcast just what a big impact the Tony Romo $17 million a year contract had, which was signed or I believe agreed to two years ago this month. Wow.

And I've been thinking about that over the weekend because announcing is really unique in the sense that everybody has exactly the same job. Right? If we're talking about like Woege's contract versus Shams's contract, regardless of who's getting the most scoops,

you could say, well, Woch has television responsibilities, right? He does this. There's a podcast. You know, it's a different job. Troy Aikman and Tony Romo and Chris Collinsworth come to work, call a game for three hours, and then leave work. And in the case of Troy Aikman and Tony Robbins,

but they were often doing it at exactly the same time on Sunday afternoon. So this idea that CBS did this crazy thing and paid Tony Rombo 17 million, matter how crazy it was, no matter how all the other networks are like, well, we're never doing that. At some point, you're like, why am I not being paid with the guy who has the exact same job as I do?

Why am I not getting that much money? Yeah. And if Fox says, well, CBS did a crazy thing, well, I'm sorry. I guess that's unfortunate, but why wouldn't I get the same money? Right. And I would also add this to it, which I didn't really think about until this weekend.

Troy was doing Thursday games. Yeah. Troy was doing more work than Tony Romo. He was doing more games. Yep. And it just creates this kind of dynamic within an organization where it's like, we did, Fox can I think totally say, we didn't do anything. we didn't ratchet this this pay thing up to $17, $18 million a year.

But as soon as it went there, it's either you're going to match it, maybe exceed it and deliver the message to your guy that we think you were as valuable or more valuable than that guy or you're not. And the answer turned out to be they didn't. And now he's at ESPN. And what is this? Where does this leave Fox? It's interesting, right?

So they've done two things in their in their history, which goes back to 94. Get really big stars or invest in really young people that you may not have heard of before they got to Fox. This is John Madden on the one end and Joe Buck into 1994 on the other, right? And Joel Klat, right, a guy they developed, Kenny Albert, you know. I mean, we could name a lot of guys that they brought up to their year. let me let me give you door number one and door number two door number one Kevin Burckhart and Greg Olson yeah Burckhardt a guy they got from the Mets telecast developed turned into a really good announcer Greg Olson's second year of announcing not from a glamour

position in the NFL or door number two who could we get for the job that's what I'm interested in I mean you know Al Michaels's his future may have been settled since we get it but is it a crazy idea to bring Al Michaels on because remember Fox has a Super Bowl this year. Yeah. We're not we're not projecting down the future here. We've got it right now. Should we be calling Philip Rivers and saying how much do you love high school coaching? Yeah. You know, I'm sure. I mean, in a way, it's kind of an enviable position because you can just call everybody. Tom Brady before he came back. Yeah, there's no, there's not going to be any hurt feelings, or at least if they are, it's, you know, Greg Olson's hurt feelings and I'm sure that's workable.

Aaron Rogers before he decided to come back to the Packers. Why not? Right. You know? I mean, give him a call, you know. We'll talk about it a little bit, but I don't think any quarterback's, you know, career plans for next season really mean anything anymore until we start the season. So why not? Give him a call. Let's call Tom Brady. I mean, is he, does he, has he unfilled his paperwork yet? I mean, yeah.

Read that tweet closely. There may have been an out for broadcasting in there. Yeah, it is, it's very intriguing, you know? I mean, it would be, you know, obviously, there's a little, there might be a little bit of an allure to. to the stability of having an announcer, you know, a first team announcer with a little bit more of a track record, but Burkhard's great.

And I guess if you're calling somebody, if you're really swinging for the fences, I mean, I'm saying that when you're calling people like Philip Rivers or whoever, like trying to bring him in, wouldn't you be a great match with him? But I guess in some sense, you can kind of say you can pick your partner

if the person is high profile enough, right? Like, we'll give you a few options. We'll work out with a workout, have a little pitch and catch with three different announcers. And we'll see who you look best. with. This is part of the announcer empowerment, right? Yeah.

Well, and Al Michael's thing isn't a bad idea either. I mean, who knows? I mean, I don't have any doubt that he could work a full season if you wanted to, but hey, Val wants to work four weeks during the regular season and come in full time for the playoffs. Who's saying no to that? It's like the NBA where you're like you have some off nights or whatever, load management, announcer load management.

Yeah. No, that could work. And I, you know, I like, I think if I were to bet, I would bet one from Colum A, it totally could be Burkhart and Olson. And I think that would just be fine, right? I think those guys, they would, those guys are already really good. They would take another step this year, especially Olson, because he's so new. And by the time the Super Bowl, you know, rolled around, they'd be fine. They'd be really good. But I could also see one from door number one, young person, or let's say, let's say person with less or less of a profile.

and one from door number two. Super high profile, right? Kevin Burckhardt and blank. Or maybe there's another way you could do that. But just both. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not hinting at anything,

but I just think, I think that's, I think everything's in play. And like I said, it's almost, it's a position where you're like, oh crap, we just lost our two biggest stars.

In Buck's case, the face of the network, the face of the sports division, if not the entire network. and I think he's probably both. But we also can just figure it out. Yeah. And they figured it out before.

When John Madden walked away in 2002, they hired, they promoted Buck and they promoted Aikman. Yeah. I mean, yeah, and exactly. For all that Eggman and Buck might do for ESPN, I think that, you know, the theory that announcers don't matter probably holds true a lot more for whatever Fox is going to be doing on Sundays, right? I mean, just about anybody would be fine calling the A games. You know, I mean, and I don't think there'd be a lot of complaining that we're getting a second class or third, you know, announced team or whatever at a Fox.

But, I mean, the flip side of that is you're right with Buck and Aigman. How do you get, how do you give Burkhart and Olson first team legitimacy? Well, you start them, you know. By week three, everyone's going to be like world renowned football announcers, Kevin Burrard and Greg Olson. It's just going to seem real the second that it materializes is real. How many cowboy games? Because we know the Cowboys are like the liquid gold of NFL viewership. How many cowboy games do they have to announce before like,

ah, welcome to the club. Welcome to the A team. Right? Don't take that many. A Cowboys Packers game in there. Here we go. I don't believe the Cowboys play at Lambo this year. Welcome to the club.

Here we go. I don't even know. Yeah, I mean, that's true. I mean, the Cowboys, Cowboys, did Cowboys fans like Troy Aikman as their, as their color guy? Yes. All right. Because he was willing to rip Jason Garrett a couple years ago. Well, that's why I was asking.

Yeah. Okay. Well, it's. Oh, they do. Yeah. They like salty Troy because the Cowboys need salty announcers. They need them. It's just, it's not every fan base is, you know, so as a self-aware enough to know that.

But yeah, okay. Well, that was by the way. Buck, you remember? there was this weird time for Buck, especially in baseball, which I think you and I are sort of see less of on Twitter, but like Buck would announce the World Series and everybody would be like, you were the St. Louis Cardinals announcer. So you were absolutely in the bag for the Cardinals. And then the Cardinal fans would be like, you have deserted us, you traitor, because you are favoring the Red Sox in this series. And Buck, when I asked him about that in his house in St. Louis

years ago. He said, I'm like Snowden. I'm a man without a country. Good line. All right, David, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious. But all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box spot where they are always, always gratefully received. Today's entry comes to us from Robert Gleason, a familiar name, David, from our past. we've heard a lot about the sanctions being leveled against Russia lately after their invasion of Ukraine well on Friday there was another one

a big one or you might say a supersized one because McDonald's decided to close all its restaurants in Russia it was an overwork Twitter joke to write finally NATO has established a no fry zone no fries on no fly zone

yeah if you thought it was a good time for the great taste of that gag. Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook, David. Kind of had an amazing moment for NFL media this week. Because every NFL podcast became an emergency podcast.

I saw you tweet this. There was no, there's no longer a distinction between Kevin Clark and Nora and Ben and Stephen getting on the mics. It's always an emergency now. Aaron Rogers decided to stay in Green Bay Emergency podcast. Russell Wilson gets traded from Seattle to Denver emergency. Tom Brady is coming back as of Sunday. Emergency podcast. What is interesting here, and we'll leave the heavy lifting

for our pals on the NFL side of this website, but all of these stories in their own way were media stories. And not just in the sense that we can get a media angle out of it, but in the Wilson and Rogers sagas, which have taken up most of the last year of human existence, they were planted in the media. Yeah. Like them and or their camps put out, put up a bat signal that says, we are not totally happy where we're playing. And then all of us came on and said, uh, speaking of emergency podcast, David, just Russell

Wilson won out of Seattle. is Aaron Rogers going to be traded? And that's what got the ball rolling. Yeah. Well, in some ways, this is like the final, like the ultimate achievement of the NFL owning the media schedule, the media calendar, right? They've, they, we've talked about this before, but they've moved around the draft and, and, and, uh, the combine and, and free agency and everything so that there's just, there's not, there's no offseason for the NFL at this point. But now it's not just the dates that they have set in stone on the calendar. It's like every time a thing happens.

Everybody, like, it's just such a big deal, right? I mean, and I don't know if it has to do with the way that the off season is scheduled, but it sure seems like this news drops at just the most, like, perfect time to get everybody's attention and to get everybody's attention away from, you know, whatever's going on in other sports, too. I mean, it's, you're right. every podcast's emergency podcast. That's not, I don't think that just is talking about a quarterback class of 2022 or 20,

but it's, it's just the way that the NFL media industrial complex is now built itself, right? Yeah, because it's, none of this really works. None of the stuff we're talking about with player empowerment or the media really works unless your sport just dominates everybody's mind. 365 days a year. Yeah. I mean, like, if, I'm trying to think of what, like, another example, if, like, Kyler Murray were traded to the dolphins tomorrow.

Emergency podcast, too. Emergency podcast, right? Of course. It's not like, it's not a quarterback on the same level as some of these others. And, you know, not going to a team that isn't necessarily on the cusp or whatever. But still, that warrants an emergency podcast. I got to say something funny because yesterday we were, you know, of course I'm texting Kevin Clark a lot, just funny stuff I see on Twitter and things like that. And the Tom Brady thing drops. And I wrote congratulations on your third emergency podcast of the week.

And a couple of minutes later, I'm sitting there and I was actually watching Frozen 2 with my daughter for the 9,000 time. And I get this text from Kevin that's like, hey, we're turning on the mics at 445. we'd obviously love to have you, but, you know, no pressure. And I just wrote back LFG because that was let's fucking go because that was in the Brady message about coming back. And it actually was not intended for me. Like you actually sent me an invite and it was intended for somebody else. And I was like, oh, I just, I just figured in this media cycle, even I'm hopping on the podcast. I was like, I don't even know what I have to say about Tom Brady.

But you just assume, like, there's room enough in the book. vote for everybody. Here we go, you know. Let's have it, let's have an emergency podcast. By the way, we could, you know what? Yesterday, your idea about anything as an emergency podcast actually got stress tested because Kirk Cousins signed a one year deal to come back to the Vikings right in the middle of the Brady news. And it was like, everybody was like, holy, uh, we actually don't care about that. That's just sad. Kirk got a raise. Whatever's going on. I mean, you know, quarterback salaries go up and up and up up. We've seen that. But this is,

Kirk Cousin is getting a raise. It might be more shocking than however much money Troy and Joe are getting paid next year. Yeah, that's like one tweet. If you're an NFL writer. There's the tiers, right? There's emergency podcast. Then there's like the lower tier, which is like

five tweets, you know, and funny memes and stuff. And then there's Kirk Cousin, which is like, I'll just kind acknowledge us. Retweet without comment. So I was looking at how these quarterback departures or sagas planted themselves in the media. And I went back to an interview Russell Wilson gave last February. He was still the quarterback of the Seahawks.

We did not have a ton of, we did not have a ton of info at that point that he was that dissatisfied with the Seahawks. So I believe there had been a report from Jason Locken, of CBS right before this interview, that maybe something was going on there. So Russell Wilson goes on the Dan Patrick show. And what was amazing about this is not just the news he had, but that Dan Patrick did an absolute fantastic job interviewing him because he said, do you want more of a hand in personnel? And I actually have some sound here.

Listen to the way he asked this question like four different times. And listen to how he just persistently politely gets an answer. answer from Russell Wilson. How much input should the quarterback have in organizational moves, veteran quarterback? Yeah, I think it depends on who it is. Well, how about you? How much, do you have any say in what Seattle does offensively with free agents or draft? Drapics. So listen to the technique there, David. You sort of lay out the general question, which you're clearly trying to get him to answer in a general way, a friendly way. So veteran in quarterbacks, how much say should they have in personnel?

And then Patrick sort of sees that, that he was a little too general, so he immediately goes in, ah, it's actually, let's talk about you. How much say should you have in personnel? And we know that's a big deal for NFL quarterbacks today. Yeah. I get to help pick my wide receivers, my offensive lineman. Wilson gives this very general answer that cites Tom Brady, LeBron James. Here comes Dan Patrick again with the follow-up.

Yeah, but that's a long-winded way of not answering my question. Are you involved in personnel decisions? Have you been involved in personnel decisions? Not as much. I don't, you know, I think that, you know, for me. Do you want to be involved, Russ? So it's really funny because when I hear people do interviews, especially with famous people, a lot of times you're just scared to ask the famous person what they really want to know.

Here is Dan Patrick asking it five times. Yeah. In slightly different ways. It's never awkward. And he gets the answer at the end. I cut it off there, but he gets the answer. It makes the news. It's funny because now that you're narrating this,

I hear that. When I listen to it, re-listen to it prior to our recording, what I heard was, maybe I'm too jaded what I heard was a prearranged an interview

for which the terms were pre-negotiated right we want this is a conversation that Russell Wilson wants to have in public Dan Patrick would you

you know we've chosen you to be the person to be the to be the interviewer and Russell will and then in the moment Russell Wilson

can't quite bring himself to say it out loud so Dan Patrick has to circle back to it for a time that's to keep asking the question to arrive at the thing that he was promised he would get.

Yeah, I sort of doubt there were prearranged terms. But doesn't it seem like... Because I think you take Russell Wilson anytime. You take Russell Wilson, but why is Russell Wilson out there? He gives a lot of interview. He was giving a subway sandwich interview to Slow Newsday at the Super Bowl. He's passing out sandwiches. So you think this came out, I mean, and this has to say nothing about Dan Patrick

Skill as an interviewer. So, Dan gets this out of him. And do you think that's where the, you think the story started as a result of this interview? Or this was just a really, or did Dan know something and he got some of this? He got, he made some of the truth public.

He could have been, certainly could have been the latter. But this is the interesting quality of these stories, right? I'm sure that the quarterback, or perhaps the quarterback's agent or their camp in some way, has a dialogue with the team and says, I'd really like better offensive alignment next year. I'd really like you to invest more in wide receivers to help me out, right?

Or new offense or call these kind of plays. I know that happens. But one quality of these sagas that we've seen is that the idea is planted in the media. And then we start doing our, and then we'd start doing it, right? The opinion shows get going. Oh, yeah. To quote Bill, the aggregators start going.

Sure. And all of a sudden, And there's this public pressure to do stuff. Like they're in the middle. They're not just having a kind of dialogue or even a dispute with an employee. They're having a dialogue with the entire sports media complex. Like Stephen A is now a party to the negotiations, Colin Coward and all these people. And I don't know if the idea, and I suppose the idea is, I'm not going to say, I don't know.

I'm going to play naive. The idea there is, right, is to put more pressure on it. that if I come out and say this, I know, Russell Wilson knows exactly what he's saying. Aaron Rogers knows exactly what he's saying. That if I come out and talk about this, then it improves my leverage.

Is that what you think? Yeah. There's a lot of ways in which playing this sort of thing out in the media could be beneficial. I mean, there's also a lot of ways in which this sort of, like I think you were alluding to, this sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at some point. You know, if every time you interview,

If every time you interviewed somebody on the press box, if they were just like, before we get started, Brian, why the hell do you work at the ringer? Like, everybody's been talking, everybody's been asking this question. At some point, somebody would get Bill or Sean would come to you and just be like, Brian, what are you saying that's making everybody ask this? Like, what is happening in your text messages, your DMs? Like, I don't, you know.

So, yeah, it becomes self-fulfilling. But it's also, it is interesting how the, it's interesting how this stuff plays out in interview form, you know, and more than that, like you said, on talk shows, first take, that kind of stuff. How it sort of takes on a life of its own in a way that, I mean, would it, would a quarterback slash agent going to team management or the ownership and saying, you know, here is a demand and we'll keep it quiet, be much less effective a means to an end? I mean, or is it just, is it a totally different animal?

I think it's, I think it may be much less effective. I mean, it depends on the person. But I think if you have an entire, a lot of reporters talking about it and you have fans that are like, why are the Packers alienating Aaron Rogers and giving us the Jordan Love era when Aaron Rogers just won the MVP twice in a row? I think it is different. I think it does have a different weight. I mean, to have this conversation about football is particularly interesting because there's certainly a lot of whatever, player empowerment, whatever you want to say that goes on in football. But in some sense, it's, you know, you can talk about announcer empowerment with a little like, you know, subtle wink. And it's football, I mean, I'm not sure that I'm not sure that announcers are that much different than football players, like football players are from basketball players.

I mean, the football is just like, obviously quarterbacks have a huge. of power compared to other football players, but football is still a really retrograde sport in terms of ownership's view of their, of their athletes, right, of the athletes that play for their team. And I think there's probably a lot more, I guarantee there's a lot more, I don't care what you think, quarterback, I will build the team the way that I see fit, than there is when you're talking to a top tier NBA star, right? Yeah, I think, yeah, I think there are more NBA players enjoy it, certainly. But the top, top quarterbacks, whether that's five or ten people, you know, in the entire

NFL, also really enjoy it. But you're right. But then there's a sort of impracticality to it, too, right? It's like Aaron Rogers can say sign the receiver I like throwing to. I think anybody likes that. But if Aaron Rogers was just like, I've been looking at some advanced numbers on how to build a secondary. I'm not sure that I'm not sure the coaching staff would really care, right?

Yeah. I'd kind of like to see that, though. you might have some interesting ideas. Probably he's done that, yeah. Brady's was kind of the weird one of the three because he had probably the most passive retirement in sports history for a major star. We've had people unretire like Michael Jordan.

But I'm not sure I've ever seen somebody like fake retire, like passively, you know, there was no press conference 40 days ago when he retired from the bucks. And that kind of got everybody going, wait a second, he's not going to do, I remember Peyton Manning's press conference. It was like this, kind of an amazing performance, like a speech and answered questions and all that stuff. And it was like, oh, wow, this is like a, this is a moment. This is, this is kind of a ceremonial sense that this is real. And this is the end. Brady never did it. And then would just

kind of do these interviews. There was one with Jim Gray on satellite radio where he said, never say never. There was another one, and I tweeted about this at the time on Fred Couples's Sirius XM show. Raise your hand if you listen to that. I know. Where he was talking about it. It was like, what?

You know, like, congrats to Sirius XM for locking down the Tom Brady unretirement scoops. And then yesterday he, and there was a Rinaldo video. I don't know if he saw that from the matches he was at over the weekend. And then he just retired on Twitter on some. Sunday afternoon in the middle of the NCAA stuff. Also after some really kind of, well, interesting comments from the owner and the coach of the bucks, right?

Yeah. I mean, and most significantly when Bruce Ariens, the buck's coach was just like, no, he's not going to get traded. So if there was, I mean, there was certainly a lot of rumors flying around that he was angling to get onto another team. So I can't imagine that whatever Bruce Ariens said to a hot mic was the decider, you know, was what actually, you know, brought Brady directly back to the team. But I don't know.

It's just the most bizarre series of events ever. I mean, from a media perspective, I think what's most interesting is that like the media angle to his comeback is going to be, or just retirement and comeback is going to be a huge, significant part of this piece of history when it's written. But I just have no idea what it means right now. I don't either. but I did love that nobody, almost nobody in the media took the retirement seriously.

I mean, there was that time at the beginning where Adam Schaefter and Jeff Darlington broke it. And they were clearly right, but the Brady just didn't say anything for a few days. But then after that happened, after we got all that out of our system, and he tweeted and confirmed it, nobody has taken this year.

Bill's been talking about him coming back for weeks. Mike Florio has been talking about him coming back for weeks. It just everybody was like, oh, Tom Brady will be a quarterback this year. So it was kind of like everybody was like, eh, I'm sure I'll be back. No big deal. Just a greatest player of the NFL history is coming back. Okay. It's so strange.

Just another emergency podcast for our friends on the football side to do. Before we leave today, David, two notes from the obituary desk. We have the first, what is believed to be the first journalist who has died while covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is from WBZ in Boston. This is Brent Renaud who was in Ukraine making a film about global refugees for Time Studios. The 50-year-old had a ton of experience covering battle zones and studied at Harvard in 2018 as part of a Neiman fellowship. But today, as he and another American were being driven past a checkpoint in Urpeen, just outside Kiev, Ukrainian authorities say Russian soldiers open fire on their car.

was killed. The other Americans survived and described the incident from his hospital bed. Urpine, you'll remember, was a city where the New York Times photographer took that picture of the family that was killed while trying to flee into the capital of Ukraine, Kiev. Renaud was in Urpine filming refugees for Project for Time. He was doing very much the same thing. He did documentaries with his brother, Craig Renaud. The New York Times piece says that Craig had started a family. So Brent Renaud was. was the one who was being sent in the combat areas to do the filming. You'll recognize he did a lot of projects that were really,

really well received. You'll recognize some of these, David, the HBO series, Last Chance High, he was involved in. Those ESPN Plus access series, he did one for the University of Central Florida football. Colleague told the AP,

he was just the absolute best word journalist that I know. This is a guy who literally went to every conflict zone. Yeah, I mean, it's it's really, you know, heartbreaking. And like you've said before, it's sort of like micro views. It's sort of what informs a broader view for most of the people who are, even the people that are trying to pay, you know,

trying really hard to pay attention to everything that's going on in a situation like this. I texted you because I woke up on, was it Sunday that this happened? I mean, this came through or Saturday. Anyway, I woke up in the morning, I think on Sunday, to two times news alerts and one was this and one was about the number of children who have so far died in Ukraine due to Russian attacks. And it jumped over to the Times website, and there's a piece of about that military base

that Russia, the Ukrainian military base, were 30, 40-ish people had died. It's interesting to see the death sort of broken out like that, but I don't really know there's a better way to do it, right? And in some sense, it certainly is significant in a different way when children die compared to soldiers, even if the soldiers are not expecting to be in the line of fire. But the journalist thing is always very interesting

because, of course, it matters to journalists, right? I mean, the news that we get about it is not skewed. It's just it's a personal focus. I mean, it's the sort of very human and humane thing to do. But I think because of that, and even separate from the fact that there's the connection to journalism, the death of journalists has sort of become the signifier in the way that we view.

armed conflict that sort of this is the this is this is this is the the first this is sort of the canary in the coal mine right this is the first signal that like war crimes are being committed right that like this is that this that war is being waged in an inhumane way um and uh and you know I think it I think though it makes you know these very personal anecdotes obviously take on a much bigger, you know, a much broader gravity because of that. Yeah. And I think also just a reminder. So there's the, you're right, there's the piece about these larger themes about war crimes, about firing on civilians and things we've talked about a lot on this podcast over the last few weeks. And then I also just on a much smaller level about just the danger of that job.

And, you know, we're glued to CNN and reading all these, these reports. And we're talking about the people who are in the field. And yet there is this just. great, great sense of danger and so much of the work they do. We talked about the sort of, you know, romantic view that we have of a foreign and war correspondence. We talked about that a few weeks ago. But also, yeah, I mean, it's like you have this sort of vague respect for the danger that they're subjecting themselves to. But again, as we've discussed before, you're seeing them, you know, sometimes in flackjackjacket, sometimes in hummus, but largely seeing them reporting from, you know, serene,

evening cityscapes behind them, you know, at times when there's, obviously, they probably wouldn't be recording and that's kind of set up if there was active warfare going on in the background. But you see them at these moments of pause, and it's easy to think, well, I don't really know the rules. I don't really know how these things are set up, but it does seem like they're safer than other people there, you know? And so when something like this happens, it does necessarily come as a shock. Yeah, goes back to what we said earlier, but not understanding the geography of these things from afar.

It's very hard to tell and certainly not understanding the danger from afar of a lot of these assignments. Also from the Obitz Department, David, the actor William Hurt died at age 71. And I bring him up because he starred in the movie Broadcast News. Which I have never seen. Now, how have you never seen broadcast news? I sent you the poster last night. I know. I love it.

I'm very aware of it. It's on, I think, I think it, it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's,

I've been watching a lot of, a lot of 80s movies, um, that were sort of my parents' movie, you know, like our parents generation movies lately. This was, this was one of those.

William Hurt was our parents generation leading man. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, him and like Kevin Klein, I guess, but,

well, there you go. Um, because you and I, by the time Kevin Costa kind of becomes the leading man of Hollywood, we're watching those movies. But he's also watching movies,

more, I mean, more movies than not that we're interested in seeing, you know? Like Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, things like that. Like, I mean, we should make a, we could do a narrative podcast that's just interviewing people of our generation and trying to get them to tell you what they thought a fish called Wanda was about. And then, like, that could be like 15 episodes of pure comedy, you know? We just didn't, we only knew about these movies in the abstract. Can I make the case for you watching broadcast news? Please do, because I'll watch it, but I'll watch it.

sooner depending on the case you make. It's a really interesting media movie. We're always talking about media movies on here, but it's a really interesting media movie because it is, it says something very profound about TV news, and it's also just a really good movie. Like that critique and those observations are lodged within a great story that you want to watch, right?

We've seen the Adam McKay School of saying something about the media where you just hit the viewer over the head with a mallet over and over again or put the words on the screen to make sure they're getting the message. This is actually a great, subtle story that is also an interesting critique of TV news in the 80s. And I'll just give you the very, no spoilers. No spoilers. Okay. But the two male characters, Holly Hunter is fantastic.

The two male characters are William Hurt playing Tom, who is very slick, very good at television, but very, very shallow. And Albert Brooks playing Aaron, who is very brainy and very into TV news for the right reasons, but not nearly as camera ready. And again, they almost seem like types when I say it like that. But within the story, they're fantastic. And it's, it is really the two selves of TV. news, right?

Which is not usually two different anchors. It's the same anchor. Yes. Because they know you do have to be good at television or people aren't going to watch. That's television, right? You can't be bad at the yard. But then the temptation is you get so slick and so good at television, I talked about this with announcers, that you just stop delivering the goods or it becomes about

slickness rather than information, the news. in educating the public. I had never seen this. And then in college, I went and did an internship at Nightline, ABC Washington during the Ted Cople days. And I came back and a friend of mine said, have you ever seen broadcast news?

And I said, no. And I sat down and watched it on a VHS tape because we're old. And I was like, oh my God, that's what I just did. That was my internship.

Mm-hmm. Because even Nightline where they were wandering around Kosovo for a week, doing like the mediest journalism you could possibly do, there was this just this two-faced quality of it, you know? And you had to honor both. Yeah. I'm only honor one. But you had to try to honor both at the same time.

And it's such a good move. And like I said, I say all that as a critique, but it's really just a great story. So to the front of your Netflix queue, broadcast news. Done. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses a strain pun headline.

Yeah. Thursday's headline about a graph maker calling it quits was, it's the end of the lines. Today's headline comes from Matthew Felling. It's from the Washington Post. It's about that same McDonald's out of Russia story I referenced earlier. But the Washington Post, David, it has standards. They couldn't just pull no fry zone from Twitter.

It had to come up with its own. pun headline. I want you to think of classic novel titles here. What was the Washington Post strained pun headline? A farewell to carbs? You're in the right zone. Not Hemingway. Does it have a farewell or a goodbye or something?

No, no. Different novel here. Different. Oh, like a war impede. type situation is Russian here we go war and

nine piece chicken nuggets yeah war and upgrade to the 20 piece yeah um war and

the quality of that delicious McDonald's food is it's got a lot of wait I feel bad I ate too much Greece

Greece war and Greece War and Greece me is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production magic by Erica Servantes. Back later this week, I think we will have an interview from Ukraine, David. Plus, more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then. See you later, Brian.