The Press Box - What’s Bari Weiss Going to Do to ‘60 Minutes’? Plus: Fox’s Joe Davis!

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Today on The Press Box, Bryan and David ponder what the upcoming new season of a Bari Weiss–led '60 Minutes' will look like. But they start by talking about NBC's broadcast of the opening game of the NFL season between the Patriots and Seahawks. Then they move on to talk about all aspects of '60 Minutes,' including the aesthetics of the show, the history, the scandals, and much more. Then Bryan is joined by Fox broadcaster Joe Davis, and they talk about how he got into broadcasting, switching between calling football and baseball games, broadcaster word association, calling Game 7 of the World Series, and much more. Plus, David Shoemaker Guesses The Strained-Pun Headline! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Joe Davis Producers: Isaiah Blakely and Jon Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to by Uber Eats. You can get almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Sorry, you can't get a beach deliver, but you can get a peach. A canoe, no. Shampoo, yes. A rocket? No way. Chocolate, yes way. It's everything you need, including $10 off your first grocery order with code,

anything 30, 30. Get almost, almost anything with Uber Eats. Order now. Order a minimum of $30 required, valid on grocery, convenience, retail, specialty foods, or flower delivery orders only, Terms and conditions apply. David? Yes.

Last night, my friend, was like being a kid and being back at school for your first day in September. Only in this case, your friends are Mike Tarrico and Chris Collinsworth. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of performative football is back on social media. For me, it's football announcers are back. Yes. It just felt so familiar. to steal a phrase from you, it felt like football.

Mm-hmm. The cadences, the back and forth. Chris going crazy when Drew Locke finally threw a good pass. I thought they were fantastic last night. If they had Toriko and Collins worth calling like off-season drills, or like, let alone preseason games, do you think you would watch? I kind of feel like I would.

I think I would watch. Just to see the banter. Yeah. Be kind of like us watching training camp. of our favorite team. Oh, they're getting things back, right? Mike's reaching for that note that you didn't even know existed. Yeah.

Chris is getting that kind of awshucks. Oh, Mike, affect going. I feel like those two calling an off-season scrimmage feels more like football than like the Manning cast on a real game. And I say that is a huge fan of the Manning cast. I completely agree. Drake May, the Patriots quarterback, decided he had one more in him. and here is Mike Tarrico calling the game losing interception.

Quick look was closed, throwing it up to the airtime. The incredulity is just right. Mm-hmm. His voice is in the right place immediately. And notice how fast, this is advanced play-by-play here, but notice how fast he gets to terrible decision. Yes. You and I are sitting on our respective couches,

our brains trying to get there. Meanwhile, he's already spoken the words. Yep. Totally true. And a lot of times announcers don't go there. They'll get to what was he thinking eventually. But to get to be that editorial, to be that precise in your condemnation that quickly is pretty impressive. If we could give Toriko True Serum, the only thing he'd say about that call, I think,

is that he would have wished to have gotten a Josh Job's name a little quicker. Yeah. That's another thing where you can tell the tippy top announcers versus the next tier down is they immediately recognize players, especially somebody like that, it's not the wide receiver, right? It's the DB and not a particularly well-known DB. Also on that way.

That was a fantastic instant replay, too, on that one. I mean, that made Jobbs just look like a million bucks, so he got his moment in the sun, thankfully. Dude, they had three looks from the truck. And you know how a lot of times you'll see three replays and one shows one foot? And then we need to get to the second replay to show the next foot.

and then we needed one more to look at it. All three replays had conclusive evidence that both of his feet were down. Oh, either the camera work has gotten a lot better or that was just the most perfectly positioned pick sex I've ever seen, but, like, it was incredible. I'll tell you what it is. It's studly work by Rob Highland in the NBC truck and his camera operators. They had that baby down.

Less than studly work, David, came from NBC's pregame show. It was out on an island yesterday. we didn't have anything else to do. I'm sitting there watching it for an hour, and the whole time I'm thinking, this is not full-on debate TV, nor is this X's and O's fluent football talk. Yeah.

It's in that weird place in the middle where Jason Garrett says things like Drake May is really taking charge this year. A cliche that has been said about every second and third year quarterback, in the history of the NFL. Do you know they're a little more vocal? You're putting their stamp on the team?

Yeah. I think they've got to pick one lane or the other. Which one? Well, which one's an interesting question. I mean, I wish I had somebody like Dan Orlovsky on that set so we could do both. Yeah. You could have a really interesting film breakdown

where you come away with one idea for people like you and me that don't understand football. But also, you could just have an opinion about something that lodges in your mind? Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm sitting there watching this and I'm like, these people had months to prepare for this game.

They've known they were going to do this game since the spring. Yeah. And when it comes to you, you need to be ready to go and have something memorable to say about this stuff. Yep.

I was, if I were me, and nobody's asked me, but if it were me, I would say, first of all, you are making Maria Taylor just speed run through so many elements and so many things can we cut these down by at least a third

so that we can have some conversations about football on this football show by conversation I mean like David gets to talk Brian gets to talk and then maybe we'll even go back to David who will challenge Brian or improve upon what Brian is this crossfire

yeah as opposed to this like really old TV idea of like blah blah blah and then the next person goes blah blah blah and then we just move on. I'm like, well, that was so unmemorable. We're just flying forward here. Yeah, exactly. I don't want to kill Mike Tomlin, too, because this was

his first full-on, regular season pregame show with NBC. He's still getting his C-legs, and they'll work on him. They'll coach him up, as he coached up many a player. And they did do this cool thing at the end where they were having, like, Tomlin's pre-game speech.

Yeah. And they said, okay, your whiteboard speech, what's the one thing for this game? And I'll remind you what it is because I bet you've already forgotten. It was when the Patriots are in obvious passing downs, how are they going to handle that?

That's not an awful idea because second and a long, third and long killed the Pats and the Super Bowl against Seahawks. The announcers talked a lot about that during the game last night. But you could also say that how do you handle third and long

is the way lots and lots and lots of NFL games are decided. Yeah. And if I have Mike Tomlin, I'm like, dude, here we go. You won a Super Bowl. You know what it's like to have smoke blown up your ass and the asses of your players all off season long. You go on TV and you give me the week one pregame speech where you tear these guys down and be like,

we haven't won Jack. We're oh and oh, the Super Bowl doesn't matter. the only thing that matters is us getting another one. Go out there and choose some scenery and create a viral moment and be Mike Tomlin. Yeah. Wouldn't that have popped on TV and social media

much more than what we got? Well, you want in theory. I mean, I think from listen, from the moment that he parted ways with the Steelers, it felt like a foreground conclusion that he would be on this show or one of these big shows. And also from that same moment, it seemed to me like he was probably like the last

coach that would actually win the audition for that show, you know? He's always seemed so reserved in most of his public-facing media interaction, which is not to say he shouldn't have the job, but it's just like, it's hard for me to imagine, but what you just described was something that is relatively easier to imagine

that could actually, you know, breathe some life into it. You've done this. Yeah. Fire us up here on the set. Last note for you about last night's game. during each of Drake May's three interceptions, I said a certain word on my couch. You know what this word is because 20 years ago,

20 years ago this past summer, I went to Columbus, Ohio for the late lamented play magazine to do a feature about Troy Smith, quarterback of the Ohio State Buckeyes. and as part of that feature, I went to Troy Smith's apartment to watch him and his stud-wide receiver

Teddy Ginn play video games. Yeah. This is so 20 years ago. This is so 20 years ago. I was in my hotel room in Columbus. Troy Smith called me and gave me his address and I went over to his apartment without a chaperone,

without anybody watching, and just watch those two dudes play EA college football. Mm-hmm. Great, control. scene for a profile, by the way. Want to come watch us play video games? And whenever they threw an interception in the video game, both Troy Smith and Teddy Gintz said,

in a very high voice, do you want to do it? Pickles! Pickles! I wasn't even there. I just adopted it immediately after you came back with the story. This is what happened. I came back and I told you, I told our pal Schuster. And for the next couple of years,

years when we'd be in a sports bar on Sunday in New York watching the Cowboys are watching football and somebody would throw an interception. You'd just see these 20-something guys in falsetto voices around the sports bar going, pickles, pickles! And I was doing that, this is completely honest, I was doing that last night during the game by myself in the living room. Like there was no answering pickles from a David or another pal across the room. But That's how big that's become part of my football watching experience. And folks, if you do that, if you start adopting as your own, it will be your own personal earworm and you will say,

Pickles! Every time there's an interception. It's unavoidable. I mean, it's just so good. Thank you, Troy and Teddy, 20 years later, for adding that to my life and David's. Maybe their most important contribution to football. Truly. All right, Dave, we got a lot to chew on today.

the season premiere of 60 minutes is three days away. We're going to talk about what Barry Weiss is going to do to that show, and we will dive into 60 Minutes history, from the glorious to the rotten. Plus, Fox's Joe Davis joins me to talk about calling football and baseball this fall, all that much more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello Media Consumers, welcome to press box. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producers. Isaiah Blakely and John

Not Bones-Jones David this Sunday I'm going to have me some fun Actually I haven't even told you this yet I'm going to fly to Austin this afternoon for a little football game known as Texas

versus Ohio State on Saturday night How much gosh How long has it been I mean speaking of Ohio State How long has it been since that's been a meaningful rivalry? You know, the last one in Austin was also 20 years ago this fall

right after Texas won the national championship. So that game two didn't come out so well for the Longhorns. Right. So we're hoping for better things tonight. I've been advised that both Matthew McConaughey and Glenn Powell are going to be on the field. So two Matthew McConaughey's or two Glenn Pals, if you prefer to see it that way. It's going to be an absolutely huge game. But I'm going to watch that with my pal and your pal, Adrian, on Saturday night.

and then we're going to sit in a hotel room on Sunday in Austin and watch football. Watch the whole slate, watch the Cowboys start there, sure to be glorious season Sunday night. And then somewhere in there, I'm going to find time for the season premiere of 60 Minutes. Oh, yeah. This is season 59 of 60 Minutes. It is the first version of the show that Barry Weiss will have fully, under her control.

Yep. Wall Street Journal reports that 35 stories are being shot or edited and 60 more are in development. We've seen teases of two pieces they have Sunday. One is about the Air Force colonel who was shot down in Iran and rescued after two days. They have the exclusive interview. That feels very 60 minutes. Good get, as they say. The other piece is about the L.A. Rams.

Oh, right. Sean McVeigh. Sean McVeigh and the L.A. games. Your usual segue out of Sunday football 60 minutes slot. For the pilot one, I mean, I saw a teaser that was about 30 seconds, not even 15 seconds long and had almost no footage from the actual interview. Is that the one you're referring to or is there a longer one that I haven't seen? No, that's it. Okay.

Yeah, it feels like the McVeigh one gives Jim Nant something to talk about when he's teasing the game. But then also you tease the fire pilot, too. People are interested in that. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, they're certainly pushing it as a big story, and the teaser that they put out is felt fresh, you know, felt different than what you would expect from a 60 Minutes teaser, made it feel a little bit more cinematic, you know,

or heavily produced, which I'm sure is the messaging they're trying to get out there, who knows how much it'll actually look different. And I think that's, as we get into this conversation, it feels like a conversation we've had before, but that's what all of the 60 Minutes talk feels like it circles back around to is not just how different will it be,

but how different can it possibly be? I completely agree. And how much different do you really want it to be? They've talked so much about modernizing the show. Mm-hmm. The show certainly feels like it is determinedly old-fashioned, from the look of it to the editing and everything else. But if you've still got a show with 9 million people watching it,

which is not nothing in this universe we're in, biggest news show on television, how much do you really want to change it? even if you're gussing it up. If you have not listened to David and I do 19,000 segments about Barry Weiss in 60 Minutes, let me remind you of everything that's happened to that show. Since we last spoke, here are the people who are out at 60 Minutes.

Scott Pelley accused Weiss of murdering the show. Sharon Alphonsey, the correspondent who accused Weiss of making political rather-the-the-all-Fonzie, than editorial decisions when she held her story about the Salvador in prison, Cecilia Vega, another correspondent, and the former executive producer, Tanya Simon. Mm-hmm. Still at 60 Minutes. Leslie Stahl.

Mm-hmm. Bill Whitaker. The designated media survivor, John Wertheim. Yes. Remember when they were purges both at 60 Minutes and Sports Illustrated, and somehow Worthheim survived both? Yep. Unbelievable. new at 60 Minutes.

Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, Noor O'Donnell. She, of course, was at CBS. She's done stuff. She's now on the morning show, too. She was a contributor. Yeah. It's a little bit like when someone gets promoted

from the end-featuring slot on Saturday Night Live to the main cast, where it just seems like media consumers care about this much more than anybody watching the show, but go on. And they don't actually care. This is something media reporters care about. That's what I mean. Media reporters, sorry. correspondent and they're like, do we know what that means?

Yeah, ask anybody on the street, what's more important? Contributor or correspondent? What goes higher? They would just shrug their shoulders. We don't understand mastheads. Also new to the show, Ross Douthit. Matt Gutman, who came from ABC News, Gianna Toboni, who came from Vice, Trevor Phillips from Sky News, Ariel Levy, whom we know from the New Yorker, and Sebastian Younger, who comes to 60 minutes from the perfect storm.

That was the strangest thing about the Sebastian Younger talk is that there wasn't like, you know, another book or two that was just as popular that I was somehow unaware of, you know? It just always keeps going back to the perfect storm. It's a damn good book. I reread it a few years ago. What was his bar in New York? Oh, God, we went to 100 book events there.

Will you look this up while I continue? Yes. Half King. The Half King. Oh, so good. Over on the West Side. So they took a picture of all the new contributors and correspondents in the Grand Central Easter Bar, which is just really fun to see an old-fashioned TV cast photo.

Oh, amazing stuff. I'm staring at it last night and I'm like, on paper, and given the limitations of being Barry Wyss, this isn't that bad? This is probably close to the best she could have come up with if she was determined to purge lots and lots of talented people from the show. Do you agree? Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't, like...

I'm trying to give a backhanded compliment here, so please take it as such. I mean, it's just such weird calculus, you know? I mean, I don't know. It's like, you know, getting like the season, the, what's it called? Like the, like the, what's it that? When you go to a basketball game and you get, like,

oh, the program. When you get like the season program at your basketball team And it's like the three players are on the front. And like maybe they're the same as last year, but probably there's some new ones. But like if it's a really big year, maybe it's all three new people, you know? Like the Sixers this year is going to have Jalen and LeBron and it's going to feel like a big deal. They could have shaken it up a lot more. I don't think anybody would have been terribly surprised.

But it does seem like, you know, there's a lot of reluctance. There's a lot of inertia against shaking it up more, internally and externally. And a lot more risk. I think if those three had left. Sure. You know, I don't, again, one thing that's funny about the 60 Minutes Correspondence, and we'll talk about some of the great ones

of you are here in just a second, but like, I'm always fascinated by how many people watch 60 minutes to watch these people versus watching the brand. You're fascinated like you want to know the answer or that there are a ton of people that just want to watch Leslie Stahl? I want to know how many people that actually do want to watch Leslie Stahl. I do, too. That was my, that of watching so.

much 60 minutes this past week from, you know, years gone by, that was what kept, what I kept thinking about. Just like how, like, to what degree, because, I mean, they're even the most famous of them, like, like, destination television, or is it just the editorial enterprise that keeps people coming back? And I think the answer is you have, you do want some kind of connective tissue. because for a lot of those 9 million people, if they turn on 60 minutes season 59 and see nobody they recognize in that awesome open

where everybody states their name, I think they would be thrown by that. Even if the pieces were 60 minutes quality, whatever we think that is, I think they'd be really thrown if they didn't recognize anybody. If everybody was new. So I think it is important to have some connective tissue,

but are you like, hey, Leslie Stahl's gone or Bill Whitaker if they had quit, I'm out. I just don't know. I think it would have been a bigger deal this year because of what a big, I mean, how much press was given to people on the production end leaving, right? I mean, if they had left on any other year, if everybody had left and they just debuted in all like 30-something roster of reporters, he would have been like, well, at least the infrastructure

is still there. But now we all know that some of the infrastructure walked out the door too. but I guess even like stipulating what you said to be true like I wonder how much difference it would make from people's perception of like Whitaker and Stahl like we're on the beginning and then never report a single story all season

you know if they were like would that be enough to make people comfortable you know they're in the cast photo so that's good enough they got put in journalistic sea cut yeah and they never cut out yeah that would be kind of funny another topic near and dear to our hearts the aesthetics of 60 minutes. You and I've been watching a lot of old pieces this week.

I wrote down a few notes and please add to these. There's a certain close-up shot of the interviewee we've gotten used to on 60 minutes. Yeah. Not always flattering, just kind of uncomfortably close. Uncomfortably close. The person will often, and I'm talking about the interviewer, or will often say something and the correspondent will just lay out for a few seconds and let that silence be a television moment.

That show does that so well. John Oliver mentioned this a couple of years ago. The correspondent will often make a statement to the person they're interviewing and encourage the person to repeat it. Oh, yeah. If somebody were interviewing you, they'd say, that Brian Curtis, he's a total schmuck, huh? And you would just go, Brian Curtis is a total schmuck. It's almost like the interviewee couldn't get there, so you're pushing the boulder

up the mountain to get them there. Just do what I say. Yeah, exactly. They do a lot of old school TV news stuff, which is like the walk and talk where the correspondent and the interviewee are under the lights and it's very formal and then you just see them walking down the street

or down a hallway talking to each other. Exactly, yeah. Or you see the interviewee working at their computer, which is just the funniest shot to me. Yeah, just trying to get that B-roll. Apparently the walk-and-talk is officially out in the built-in era. of 60 minutes now.

Yes, he told Benmel of the Times, they're getting rid of it, which is probably a good thing. I think that the podcast era where he can do with Lesby Roll. Again, maybe it'll be jarring when we watch and we will not have David typing in his computer or freehand illustrating something for the ringer.

They also love to end on the quote. Yeah. 60 Minutes loves the hammer of a quote at the end. That's it. That's the biggest thing for me. and then crash to the ticking stopwatch. Yeah. Boom.

That is a 60 minutes ending. The 60 minutes stop. I mean, the stopwatch too is a great little bit because it, I mean, it's hammy, but it's just so identifiable. And it, and it both like metaphorically and almost literally drives the point home that this is, that was the, that was the hammer. Like you said, that was the end. That's the thing to remember. Is it, do you think it's more of, I was wondering this when I was watching just today, is it more of a 60 minutes? minutes thing than other places to lay off the reporter on camera.

It feels like there's a whole lot of reporter talking off camera, just with the camera lingering on the subject, like getting some more of that, that, you know, like just that reaction footage of them. That's definitely become a sports doc thing. Yeah, but I was watching like Mike Wallace. It was a lot of that Mike Wallace interviews that I was watching. It was like you would see relatively little Mike Wallace for how famous he was, you know, for how significant he was.

Do you think that was old-school editing where it was harder to get a picture of your correspondent listening intently or nodding? I feel like I saw more of Mike Wallace's like shoulder, like over his shoulder than like his face in some of those interviews. But maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention. I mentioned Mullen's piece in The Times. He also reports that 60 Minutes is going to freshen up the graphics

that are behind the correspondence when they intro their pieces. The book thing is one of the craziest old-fashioned things that still existed in modern media. the images behind the introduction were just so wild. That to me is the most, like when I think of 60 minutes, I think for most people, you think of that shot, right? The black box reporter sitting on a stool with a full-color screen behind them,

it feels very much like a play, doesn't it? Like, it's like this person, and part of it is like prior to, you know, 2010, like so many of these reporters had the same voice as like, you know, as the stage manager in our town or whatever, you know, but like they, but it would just be just someone just sort of monologing as like a, as a, as a,

as a, as a, as a screen behind them like shows various shots of this, of the story that they're telling. Um, that is the most 60 minutes thing of all, but they, that they're getting rid of that little, that weird like scrapbook aesthetic is, is,

is definitely a good call. It would always have a headline on the book and then the name of the producer. Yes. Which as a kid, you're just like, what? Who is here? There's somebody else works on this show. Mike Wallace isn't the only one. I was reading about that this summer, and Don Hewitt, who's the legendary producer, creator of 60 Minutes, thought of it as a news magazine.

That word is now very, very common, but in the 60s it was not. More literal. And he was literally thinking of, this is Life magazine but for TV. So when you. introduce your piece, you need a double truck behind you that looks like the beginning of a magazine feature.

Yeah. And that's where that comes from. And the producer is just sort of like the editor credit. It would be on the Mastad or like whatever. Today nobody knows what a magazine is, so probably a good time to freshen things. No, people think, when people think magazine, they probably think of shows like 60 minutes instead of physical

objects. If anything. Also, this is according to the New York Post, they've talked about adding a new Andy Rooney-like segment to the end of the show. And 60 Minutes even reached out to people like Jerry Seinfeld, Stephen A. Smith and John Cleese. I saw John McEnroe on one of the lists as well. This is when I was like, are the people running 60 minutes a lot older than I think they are? Because if I said, hey, David, I'm thinking about some people in the press box, Jerry Seinfeld and John Cleese, you'd be like, Brian, it's time to freshen up your cultural references.

as we sit here and do a 60 Minutes show, I recognize the irony in what I'm about to say, but I'm glad, I mean, you are correctly identifying the sources of these things that you're saying, but like you said there was the post piece, there was a Times piece, there was a Hollywood Reporter piece,

there was a deadline piece. There were many, many more, and basically all of them read, like, press releases fleshed out. You know, they all had, like, 95% of the same information in them,

which is not an indictment of those. outlets because people want to read this, but I think that, like, it's, it's intriguing to think of the degree to which 60 Minutes is an institution through that lens. Like, this is a story that you're going to write out, that you're going to write regardless of whether or not you have, you know, a sort, like a specific angle on it, right? This is just like public news, like, this is a public utility to report on 60 Minutes. I was struck by that. And also, by the way, Weiss and Company, or at least Weiss's lie, lieutenants are now, playing nice with the press.

Oh, yeah. There's a little more openness. Also, Billton, going back to the point you made, Billton is still playing coy about the end of the show segment. So it better be, I mean, like, Jerry Seinfeld is a, would be a letdown at this point just because his name has been out there. I can't imagine what it could possibly be. Or either just idiots for being this silly about it.

Those three names I mentioned, those are all people that have at least played in kind of edgy political zone. Remember Jerry Seinfeld talking about not performing on college campuses anymore. So I do wonder if we get somebody from that general zone. Also, speaking of Andy Rooney. His daughter works for the free press, by the way. Andy Rooney's daughter? No, Jerry Seinfeld's daughter works for the free press.

Jerry Seinfeld's daughter, yes. Andy Rooney was this white-haired curmudgeon who ended 60 minutes for David and I's entire childhood by complaining about things profound or as small as why are there so few cashews in the thing of Mix nuts. Mix not. Make them planners. That actually happened. At least I remember it happening.

The last time we talked about this, I just, I think I said, I don't think he was doing a bit. And you said he was kind of doing a bit. And I've watched, I left that show and watched Andy Rooney for like 45 minutes, trying to discern whether or not he was doing a bit. It's really tough. Will Leach wrote a piece in the Washington Post opinion section the other day. Speaking of media survivors, Will still writing for the Washington Post opinion section.

Way to go well. Saying, man, you know, Andy Rooney was. you know, he was a real reporter and he was great and he wasn't doing a put on and I was just like, I want to take a time machine and go meet 20-something will and said someday you will write an earnest defense of Andy Rune.

This is a real thing that will happen in your career. I know you don't believe me. Let me show you the screenshot from the Washington Post. Two big questions for this year's version of 60 Minutes. What's Barry Weiss going to do to the show? and secondly, how will we know it? So last year, she got involved in the show

and we were all tipped off to it because the correspondence decided to pick up the bullhorn and tell the world. There were more great memos written in. It was almost like the walktale report about the clippers. Some of the best media writing was done in memos or emails about 60 minutes from the people that worked there. Yeah. Guy Campaniel, who's the managing editor who was just dismissed in May, had a post recently. He said, we would not compromise our principles or reputations by jamming unverifiable notions or White House talking points into our reporting.

We objected when told to conduct interviews arranged by the administration. And he continues, to be clear, we were told to leave because we insisted on doing our jobs. Mm-hmm. So with this year's version, or this season's version, I was thinking about things to look for. Of course, any kind of administration friendliness that creeps in, that I think will be pretty easy to tell. Sure. And it sounds like Barry Weiss and CBS has lots of people still there that are happy to call a reporter if they see something or smell something that is funny. Yeah.

The selection of stories will be fascinating. Yes. I mean, I think that'll be that on a week by week basis, if there's anything that's like particularly galling, or let's just say particularly glowing or the angle you didn't expect to see more friendly to the administration, people will call that out. But I think the bulk of that will be sort of,

I think we'll be discussing this in January or February, right? It's just like when you look back on the season so far, what are the, like, what are the number of stories that did X or did Y? You know what I mean? I think it'll be a little bit harder to discern in real time aside from like Twitter sniping. That's the thing. And I guess that's the question I'm getting to

is like if you didn't have the people inside CBS tipping you off, how easy would it be to discern? Because 60 Minutes is a oftentimes on the one hand, on the other hand, kind of show, just like all of network news. And very slow moving. I mean, compared to most of the modern TV media establishment, I mean, they, they, I mean, the stories are, it's, it's slow cooking, you know, I mean, a lot of those stories take a long time to produce. And so they deliberately will pick out stories that will give them a little bit more lead time that don't need to go immediately. And, and, you know, it's sort of a, not a vicious circle, but it works in a cyclical fashion like that. That, that, but I think that to your, to the leaks point, I think that there will still be some leaking, I think, going on. If anything particularly egregious,

but also I think we'll hear, my guess is we'll hear from a lot of the already exiled voices who have closer connections to the show. You saw, was it, no, it was a Hollywood reporter piece, had just a lot of quotes from Wendy McMahon, who's a former news exec. They weren't particularly damning, but she was happy to go on the record, you know, and I think that there'll be a lot of that. I mean, I'm not sure that it'll be like a weekly Scott Pelly podcast where he's just talking about all the shit they didn't publish.

But, you know, I think that there'll be, although people would listen to that. Feel free to come on the press box, Scott. And talk Texas Tech football in 60 minutes anytime. But yeah, I mean, but I think that most of it is going to be really hard to discern in real time. I mean, I think people will be watching, obviously, more, people are going to be watching 60 minutes more closely than they have in 20 years because of the Barry Weiss takeover. But if you look at the actual changes, I mean, not the, if you look at the reported, alterations that Billton has made so far.

We've mentioned a couple of them here, but this is from the Times. He told camera operators to avoid walk-in talks. He has done away with the fuzzy shadow under the 60 Minutes logo. As a graphic designer, I am wholeheartedly behind this, and replace the giant book graphics that

appear behind the correspondence before each new segment with streamlined rectangular screens. First of all, that's all unobjectionable stuff, I don't know if they're just sort of making it seem like there's not going to be that big of a deal, but at the same time, it makes me wonder, like, how much can possibly change? Like, from the inside, does that feel like monumental change? Does Bill, is there, are, or, or, or, by extension,

Barry Weiss out there touting this stuff because they feel like it's significant, because even if people in-house are losing their minds, like, it's not at all. You know, like, that stuff does not matter. And it feels like a nod to this so far unearned idea that Barry Weiss is bringing CBS news into the internet age. Remember what a free pass she's gotten in every article? It's like, oh, she actually is taking this hidebound old institution, and she's bringing it to the internet, like the free press, and then you look and like nothing has actually happened?

She hasn't done almost nothing to do that. But we just keep gesturing at it. The Hollywood Reporter piece talking about faint praise says, let's see, this should. was the best in its category, but was slower than others to adopt a changing consumer habits. This is the line I was talking about, though it was working on some digital initiatives when Weiss took over CBS News. See, I think two things could be true here. 60 minutes and all of network news has been incredibly slow to figure out what's coming.

Yeah. But secondly, she hasn't done very much, if anything, to speed up that process. people just assume because she's from the free press that she's done that kind of stuff and if you look she actually hasn't but I do think there are certainly things again to the earlier point there's certainly things they can do because 60 minutes has been so slow

and all of network news has been so slow to figure out how they're going to compete in a new environment another thing about 60 minutes is fascinating is we think of it as this great bastion of journalism investigative journalism heroic reporting It is that. It also does lots of pieces that are celebrity profiles or just fun stories. Yeah.

I was looking at the last episode of the previous season. The three stories were prediction markets, which is something everybody's done doing stories on now. London cabby's skeptical about robotaxies and an interview with Christopher Nolan. Now, how would Barry White, affect any of that except possibly picking different stories to do, right? Like there's no, I think some of 60 minutes

is just stuff to get you through the week. And I think to go back to your original question, the vast majority of the change of Barry Weiss's influence, I mean, last season she came in mid-race, right? I mean, she, and she, the changes

that she... She got involved anyway, yeah. Yeah, I mean, and she, you know, the changes that were reported, you know, her reportedly, like, not killing stories or killing adjacent, whatever. But, like, you know, that stuff had an effect on stories that were started before she got there or before she was exerting her influence. And so I think that the biggest shift from an ideological standpoint will come in the pitching phase, right? We'll be in, like, the greenlight phase.

And that's not something that we're used to being particularly privy to or that we would, that most consumers would even know what to do with if they had all the information. So I think it'll be a lot more I mean I think it'll be a lot harder to kind of parse out. So what is Ross Dautha going to do? I think he said in the Times piece that he's working on a story about AI

which is funny and vague but I'm fascinated by how they're going to use him. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a doubt that hater. I disagree with him. There's a way to use him that would be very good. I think I disagree with him just about everything.

but it is interesting to have somebody who seemed to have a sort of free reign to do whatever they wanted at the New York Times of all places for so long and for them to switch jobs and for people to say like, I don't know what they're going to do, right? What are you going to do? What on earth could you not have done? Could you not have done an AI conversation at the New York Times?

Like, you know, all this stuff was accessible to you. I don't know if 60 Minutes is going to have Antichrist corner in the same way that the New York Times did. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. A little history of the show. This comes from David Blum's excellent history of 60 Minutes, Tick, Tick, Tick.

Yeah. Which I reread over the summer. 60 Minutes created in 1968 by Don Hewitt, the aforementioned. A brilliant, flawed mercurial figure, which describes lots of producers. Hewitt had been pushed out of the CBS Evening News by Walter Cronkite and was looking for something to do. Mm-hmm.

he creates the news magazine. Yeah. And if a magazine piece is longer than a newspaper story, but shorter than a book, he envisions 60 minutes stories the same way, longer than the two minutes you get on the evening news, but shorter than a full-blown documentary. Mm-hmm.

20-ish minutes. Yeah. You can get into things in 20 minutes without being exhaustive about it. You can have, I mean, I think really from a viewer's point you, you can have multiple interviews, multiple talking heads in the same story. It's not, you're not restricted to just getting a first person to count and then moving on. We mentioned the magazine covers taking Stopwatch, which comes to 60 minutes just a few weeks after it was on the air in 1968.

The original correspondence were Harry Reisner and Mike Wallace, both of whom became huge stars. 60 minutes eventually wound up in the 7 p.m. Eastern slot on Sunday, which I remember read in the LA Times was once a public affairs or children's programming slot. So you couldn't put your wild sitcom or drama there. No. You had to park something worthy there, which gave 60 minutes as great advantage because it was better TV than a lot of other worthy options. Yes.

Thanks in part to the correspondence and producers. And again, yeah. Again, I mean, and younger listeners will have no concept of just the, how much just like even network TV was a wasteland on the weekends. You know, I mean, when there wasn't, I mean, even football wasn't as big of a deal, but when there wasn't like a national sports broadcast or Saturday morning cartoons, like the most watched channel in your entire city could be showing Beverly Hillbillies reruns. I mean, it was, yeah.

Especially Saturday nights. I mean, that was brutally bad. Yeah. One thing about 60 minutes is it was often a rinketons. Ratings Juggernaut. It got to number one for the first time in 1978. Beating shows like all in the family. This is when we had sitcoms and dramas

that were pulling down gigantic audiences of tens of millions of people. The correspondence became big swashbuckling stars. You think of Mike Wallace confronting the crooked insurance guy or Dan Rather going into Afghanistan. I thought about Pablo Torre because somebody was tweeting the other day

about Pablo's producers not getting enough credit. And I thought there's almost a parallel there where Pablo very, very much acknowledges the producers. Yeah, on every episode of his show. And they were like co-winners of the Pulitzer. But part of the illusion of that podcast and television is that the person you see on the screen did all the work. Oh, yeah, of course. They may say it a hundred times. But when you are watching it or listening to it, you're like, that man there did all the research for the story, went out and found these.

people and is confronting them on camera. They're doing the heavy lifting. That's part of an illusion we love to indulge in as viewers. Yeah. There were lots of consumer type stories in 60 minutes. This is part of what Billton wants to bring back, hidden cameras. Don Hewitt once told the LA Times is David Shaw. Remember that scene in Network?

The one where the guy says everyone should open their windows and shout, I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. Well, people don't do that. They come to us instead. We have a bigger window and we yell louder. It's funny because you often think of that stuff as being local news material. We are protecting you, the consumer. You and I, David, also grew up in an era of 60 Minutes knockoffs, 20-20,

Dateline NBC, which we're going to talk about in-depth later this month, and then 60 Minutes 2, which has just got to be one of the funniest titles that a television show has ever gotten. He was on a different night for a while. Yeah, the spinoff is just sort of, yeah. It was hard to imagine that time that a news show needed a spinoff, but I guess with those ratings, it's hard to say no to. And it was Roman numeral, too, if I remember right, 60 Minutes. Wow.

So was Beverly Hills Cop 2. No, was it or was 3 the Roman numeral? Anyway, a lot of movies did there too. I made a list of 60-minute scandals. This comes from David Blum's book. Some of these I was not aware of and are just really mind-blowing. If your interest in 60-minute scandals is more recent. Scandal number one, CBS News paid Richard Nixon, Hinchman, Bob Alderman, $100,000 for an interview in 1975.

Yeah. It's more than $600,000 today. There was a kind of funny workaround where they said, oh, we're also buying his home movies, does B-roll for this interview? The interview was conducted by Mike Wallace and preempted two episodes of 60 Minutes so it was kind of 60 Minutes without officially being 60 minutes but come on. Also the interview turned out to be a bust.

They also paid $15,000 for an interview with Gordon Liddy, speaking of henchmen. Scandal number two, in 1998, Don Hewitt sounded out Candice Bergen about joining 60 Minutes. Now, why would Candice Bergen be qualified to do this? she had played a TV newswoman on Murphy Brown during the 90s.

Bergen even tried to book interviews, according to Blum, before the staff revolted and the plan was called off. That really happened. She was doing it as Candice Bergen? She was not doing it as Murphy, you know. That might have had more...

But would she have been playing... Is it sort of like Stephen Colbert where she's sort of herself, but playing a character? That's what's so weird, right? It's like, oh, get Larry Sanders to follow Jay Leno in the late night slot. It's like, no, that's a television character that gentleman is playing. It is, I should say, in retrospect, I mean, it's crazy.

And I understand the staff's decision to revolt. But it is a little bit forward thinking in the sense that, like, we often talk about the degree of confidence we had in, the news people of the 50s, 60s, 70s, right? And then that sort of, and now we're like, whatever happened to that. But even in the 80s, it was shifting over to television personalities to people like Candace Berg

and to people like Bill Cosby, heaven forbid, you know, like whatever, to those like the big stars of that era were more the people we trusted than the newsmen and women. I agree. And by the way, in the era of the podcast, especially the celebrity podcast,

doesn't seem that weird. No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, honestly, it's like if someone of that level of fame, and Candace Bergen was a huge star at the time, that show was so big, someone of that level of fame is interested in doing that job. I mean, they wouldn't be interested in doing it now.

They'd be interested in having their own podcast, but if they're interested in doing it, that's kind of all the information you need to green line it, right? Scandal number three. In 1990, CBS suspended Andy Rooney for three months for making offensive remarks about black and gay people in a magazine interview. And here's the thing. I got this from Blum's book, too.

After 60 minutes ratings cratered during that suspension, they lifted the suspension and brought Rooney back early. I remember that. I remembered that at the time. Also, this goes to my he's not doing a bit argument, but go ahead. Yeah. Scandal number four, just watch the movie The Insider, and you'll get all the information you need about that one.

Also, you can watch the movie Truth to learn about Dan Rather in the George W. Bush, Texas Air, National Guard documents. I actually don't watch the movie truth, but read a story about that. Scandal number five, the LA Times reported in 2018, quote, CBS has been paying a former female CBS News employee millions of dollars over the last 20 years to settle claims that she was sexually assaulted by 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt. According to an investigative report, there were allegations of harassment and worse

detailed in Rolling Stone as far back as 1991. That is a necessarily short list because we don't have all day to go into the scam. The details, the details, the stories, the allegations dated back to 91 or the reporting dated back to 90s? The reporting was in Rolling Stone in 91. Okay. So there you go. Let's finish here, David. If people want to watch some great 60 minutes segments this weekend.

Oh, God. And this is my plea to Barry Weiss. Put all the archives online. Mm-hmm. You can watch back to like 2012-ish. on Paramount Plus, but there are so many great 60 Minutes segments of your, they're online in a very piecemeal sort of way,

just put them all on YouTube. Does, do 60 Minutes have one of those channels on the, like, the, when you, like, got your digital television and it has, like, the whole lineup of, like, nonstop supermarket sweep on one channel, and they should have one, because I get to tell you, man, 60 Minutes, old 60 Minutes episodes are just wildly rewatchable. And the length of the individual stories is just right for how much you want to digest, you know, when you're not really committed to the subject or whatever. And sometimes the subjects, you're about to talk about a couple where I learned things from 1980-something broadcasts, you know?

Like, it's pretty incredible. You're like, this happened? Yeah. But there are some fantastic ones out there. And we just put together three that are happen to be on YouTube so you can watch them. Number one came from 1992. It's called the Governor and Mrs. Clinton. Correspondent was Steve Croft

who interviewed Bill and Hillary on Super Bowl Sunday for a segment that would air right after the Super Bowl. Yes. And the occasion was there have been reports that Clinton had an affair with Jennifer Flowers. Clinton is running for president the first time. His campaign is on the ropes.

He needs to go on television and set the record straight, or at least say something to get him through the rest of the primaries. We know how that ended. Here is the Hillary Clinton quote from that interview that everybody remembers. You know, I'm not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he's been through and what we've been through together.

And, you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him. It's my favorite clip from fried green tomatoes there, Brian. Thank you for airing that. So Hillary's Southern accent, did that just knock you upside the head when you rewatched? We just saw her today on Morning Joe. I mean, you know, there's always talk about how the accent has changed, but it was pretty stunning. I watched Steel Magnolias after Dolly died, and she was just right out of that movie. And it's not even like just a Southern accent.

It's almost like someone not from the South putting on a Southern accent a little bit, but I'm not accusing her of anything. certainly she was from that part of the world. But yeah, it was so, that part was so, so bizarre. And by the way, the timeline, they set up the timeline that you mentioned before the clip at the top of the broadcast. I mean, like, a month before this episode, I don't think if there, if there had been a, they sort of allegations or revelations or whatever come out about Bill Clinton,

I don't think he would have been invited on 60 minutes. Like he had just hit that position of, he was just, he was the leader of the, you know, of Democratic potential nominees, kind of coming out of nowhere. And so this all, it was like a tidal wave of media acceptance and then controversy. People should look this up because Steve Croft is great. Hillary's great. Bill Clinton is incredible in this.

Going back to the Candace Bergen point, I'm pretty sure Steve Croft was just an actor playing a newscaster through most of his career. He is the most, he is the most just like straight out of Central. casting guy to ever have this job. He does, and he just has, he looks, he's just a little, kind of a, he was describing the Blumbook as an unlikely star, and I think that's probably right. But the way he does this, so what he's trying to do is, he asked Clinton a couple of times, will you rule out right now that you have ever had an affair?

Yes. Because there's all these things swirling around. I know you're saying, you know, that you've, you know, you've done, you know, you've said these vague things. Can you just rule it out today? And Clinton's like, you know, Steve, I've said. said more than any presidential candidates ever said, I've caused pain in my marriage, but I think the people at home know what I'm talking about. Yeah. And he's saying in a sense, like,

I'm being intentionally vague about this. I'm not answering your question, but I think my non-answer is enough of a wink-wink at the folks out in America that they will vote for me anyway, which is exactly what happened. Absolutely true. And I think saying I'm not going to answer your question with your wife sitting next to you on 60 minutes, particularly on 60 minutes, and that kind of stage was really significant to making that point. I mean, what would really struck me when I was watching this is how the unspoken part of his argument, because they kind of go around in circles, asking the same question over and over again, asking and answering. We're not answering. But what really struck me is the unspoken argument was basically you never

asked JFK about this stuff. Why are you asking me? Right. But saying that out loud would have almost been more controversial than just the revelation of an affair, right? I mean, just like actually calling into question our societal morees was a bigger deal than the actual issue at hand. Yeah, it's very, it's very interesting to watch to watch back. And also, Croft, I mean, I have to say unintentionally, but it seems so cinematic, accidentally unintentionally tease up the biggest moment in the interview where after, after he, Clinton has decided to, you know, to not answer this question so many times. He says, well, I think people do appreciate

how much you guys have worked through this and come to an arrangement and they cut them. And Bill says, this is not an arrangement. This is a marriage. You know, like, whatever. We love each other. This is a marriage, not an arrangement. I object to your word choice.

It's such a moment. But to watch it back, like, it's almost like, you almost wonder if Kroft knew what he was going to, knew what he was teeing up, you know? Because it seems like, as he's saying it, you're like, why would you use that turn of phrase? Like, it's so bizarre, but it was an incredible moment.

He did a bunch of press when all the 60 Minutes stuff came down. I desperately want to get him on the show because I'd love to do a Steve Croft retrospective. Second clip that you can go out watch. This was new to me. It's a piece called Linnell Jeter's in jail. From 1983, Morley Safer, there's a name, was the correspondent. Linnell Jeter was an engineer for E-Systems, a company in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. where David and I spent many of our years,

he was arrested for robbing a Kentucky fried chicken restaurant and was given a life sentence for armed robbery. Lonell Jeter was black. Everybody who tried him, the lawyers, the sheriff, was white.

Newspapers had reported on this story, but then Safer and his producer, Suzanne St. Pierre, went down to Texas and just took this case apart piece by piece. And they put the DAs on camera. They put witnesses on camera. It turns out he was just at work when all this happened. The part that made no sense is why would this person just go be robbing random fast food restaurants?

They said because it's like a thrill kill, basically. That was the prosecutor's argument. It was like, yeah, we have lots of people out there who do it just for the thrill. Oh my gosh. And, you know, Safer's being like, okay, that doesn't make any sense. But then I have people that are placing him at work when this happened. Yeah, that you guys deliberately didn't talk to. Even if he had weirdly wanted a thrill, which doesn't make any sense either.

And then he finds this witness that was actually the new Linnell Jeter and was held up at the Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was one of the customers at the game. Yeah, it was like, if my coworker had walked in here with a gun, I think I'd know who it was. none of these people were talked to or in a lot of cases are just brushed over by the authorities. Fantastic old school piece of journalism.

Are you going to not spoil it? You're not going to say the ending? Because I think it's significant. The significant is Linnell Jeter got out of jail after the piece, right? Four days later. Four days later. That's the craziest thing. Well, they have Morley Safer doing it like bookending this, like modern

morally safer commenting on the piece. Modern. Not ancient Morley- say for bin most but he said I think he said three four days later I mean he was out of prison which is shocking that it would that anything could move that quickly but it shows the significance it shows the power of 60

minutes it does because my understanding is here that the local news had been on this yeah and but here comes 60 minutes we're going to put it on national television on Sunday night and all of a sudden people that might have been trying to tough their way through this you know let this

injustice be perpetuated, are like, uh-oh, time to fix this. Number three, and also available on YouTube, is a piece by Mike Wallace. We had to have Wallace in here. Absolutely. I considered his interview with Johnny Carson, which is really, really good. Do you watch a little bit of that this weekend? It was so good. I mean, I don't know about the average listener or, you know, person who's listening to this

podcast, but, like, to me, when I think of Mike Wallace, when I think of Mike Wallace, when I picture him in my head, he's sitting in a chair at about a 83 degree incline, you know, just like leaning way back, legs crossed cigarette out in, like in his hand with his elbow, like level with his head, you know, basically reclining. And, uh, and the, the, the, Johnny Carson one got closer, a little bit closer to that picture of Wallace. I think what's really stunning about this, this interview, I mean, one, he really does get to, you know, Johnny Carson the real person pretty quickly, which is novel for the year 2026 that you would get past someone's facade. But it's interesting looking back to like their peers. I mean, if anything, like, is like, is Wallace more famous than Johnny Carson at this moment in time? Probably so. I mean, but like it's, I think we grew up a lot with reporters having this very easy repartee with celebrities, but never really.

being in the moment in time where they were more famous than the celebrities. Does that make sense? And it almost seemed like one of the skills that Barbara Walters had was acting comfortable around famous people. But in fact, she comes from this era where she was probably more famous than a lot of the people she interviewed. You know what I mean? Totally.

In this case, two gigantic stars of network television. Yeah. Playing tennis. Playing tennis. Johnny smoking. Anyway, we didn't choose that one. So that's a nice lead above something we didn't choose. But go watch that if you want.

The piece we chose was. called Secret Service Agent Number 9. Oh, God. From 1975, it's about Clint Hill, who was a Secret Service agent who hopped on the limo after John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Covered up Jackie O.

Kind of pushed her back in her seat and shielded her. They're talking about Secret Service stuff generally at the beginning of the interview, and then Wallace brings up the events of 1963. And Clint Hill's face at that moment is unbelievably heartrending because it's almost like he just shrinks and, you know, you see just pain on his face as he remembers the day. It's the kind of expression that television news was invented for. It is so moving and hard to watch. Here's Wallace asking Hill if he thought he could have saved Kennedy's life that day in Dallas.

You mean you would have gotten there and you would have taken the shot? The third shot, yes, sir? And that would have been all right with you. That would have been fine with me. But you couldn't. You got there in less than two seconds, Clint. You couldn't have gotten there. You surely don't have any sense of guilt about that.

Yes, I certainly do. I have a great deal to guilt about that. Had I turned in a different direction, I'd have made it. That's my fault. Oh, no one has ever suggested that for an instant. All that you did was show great bravery and great presence of mind. What was on the citation that was given you for your work on November 22nd, 1963,

extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger. Mike, I don't care about that if I had reacted just a little bit quicker. And I could have, I guess. I'll live with that to my grave. Unbelievable stuff. there's even even before he even before he fully breaks down there's some parts that are just

kind of shocking to hear and like I said there's like we feel like I feel like the JFK assassination comes up especially at the ringer comes up once a week but there's stuff in this interview where I'm just like oh I mean like I've I didn't remember this stuff at all

no and also it helps you remember it's not some game that you play you know it really is something that means something to people and haunts people yes one of the the first thing that got me in this whole thing was when he started talking about it. There's also some really, you know, obviously specific, time-wise, specific things. Talks about how there were renovations at Nixon's house, at his home that were like, you know,

identified as Secret Service renovations that were actually not, you know, and that was a sort of, there was a million dollars spent on renovations that were unnecessary. That was the big controversy at the time that sort of rings true to the present day. but the thing that got me was the first time the the the Kennedy assassination came up I realized like I don't know that I've ever seen anybody interviewed about the Kennedy assassination outside of a documentary like someone who was actually there sort like closer to the time that it happened like it was like it was still news you know what I mean like it wasn't just immediate reportage after the fact but like like oh yeah you were there like this is

this is relevant it was it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's just a bizarre way to think about it. Truly is. Truly. Anyway, lots of good stuff for you to go find on YouTube this weekend. David, let's bring in our special guest. Joe Davis stopped by the ringers L.A. headquarters. He's calling Steelers Falcons is Sunday.

And then he's going to become our baseball guy, America's baseball guy, once the postseason begins. We talked about being the son of a football coach, about how his dad, that is Joe Davis's dad, is his spotter in the booth, even to. Today, talked about game seven of last year's World Series, play-by-play announcer word association. Here is Joe Davis. Joe Davis, thanks for coming to Ringer headquarters. Brian, happy to be here.

Thanks for having me. We're right on the doorstep of NFL season. Baseball postseason starts in a few weeks. How do you become an ambidextrous broadcaster and call both sports at the same time? Yeah, this is October people think is like, oh, that's got to be a crazy month. But really September is the one that's extra crazy because of the car. crossover, whereas October I'm just baseball. October going from Dodger baseball to NFL football to the occasional Fox baseball game still, that's where it gets a little bit crazy.

How I handle, I think the first thing is like, yeah, it's crazy, but it's also the coolest thing in the world. It doesn't take much for me to be the 15-year-old again that dreamt of doing this. So any time I feel bogged down, I can very quickly go to that place and appreciate the craziness of it. And then how I make it happen is just I try to design the day sort of like a hit workout, where it's really hard at one thing and then a little break. And then it's really hard at the other thing and then a little break. And I got to have clean breaks and clear lines when I'm going from one thing to the next. So the NFL prep doesn't bleed all day through the Dodger prep.

It's more I know I'm going to have 90 minutes to do NFL prep today, and then I'm going to shift over to Dodger prep, and then I'm going to head to the stadium. and I just try to be really intentional about setting up each hour of the day, especially this time of year. What does calling a football game allow you to do that calling a baseball game would not? Quite literally, stand up, and I tell you that because I think that's a good way to explain the difference. Football, you're standing up, you're leaning forward, baseball, you're sitting down and kind of leaning back. And so it's just an entirely different vibe and mood and even physical method with the way you call the game.

I think a lot of people don't know that football announcers stand up for the entire game. Yeah, yeah. It's very funny to see it in a booth. Because you think, oh, that's just a stand-up I'm seeing before the game and a halftime. But it's actually the entire game. You guys are standing. Yeah, standing and leaning forward. Now, occasionally I'll admit if a game gets out of hand and it's not as good,

I'll get one of those high chairs and I kind of sit back and like pout a little bit that we're not getting as good of a game as we had hoped. But yeah, typically we're standing up leaning forward. How did the pitch clock change your job? Oh, geez. I don't know. how, I mean, it's, I'm being a little over the top of you're saying, I don't know how we did it before, but it's totally different. It's, I mean, I can't tell you how many games where you feel like these days where it's like, man, that one's really dragging and poorly pitched, there's a lot of walks, and then you look up and it's done in two hours and 50 minutes, whereas before that would have been a four-hour game.

And it's not that I have anywhere to be, like I'm just talking about an extra half an hour of sleep or whatever one way or the other. it's what happens within that time that feels so different. The three and a half hour baseball game feels like a different sport from the two hour and 50 minute baseball game that has the pitch clock. Did you have to pair the anecdotes back by like 25%, 50%? It'd be hard to put a number on it. I think I had to get better at anticipating when I wanted to go to those anecdotes, those stories, and being really aggressive with them.

when I was going to go to them. Whereas before it would be easier to kind of meander in and out and just, okay, here's a gap that I'm going to fill with whatever. Now it's like you've got to sort of have an idea where you're going to go. And I think of it as pop, crack, go. Pop of the mat, crack of the bat, go. And I also think there's something to the structure that that gives the call and the rhythm that that gives the call.

Pitch clock or not, when you're not wandering, drifting in and out, it is more intentional about there's a story to tell and my job is to bring people information, entertain them, and to, again, use that lean forward term, look at it that way. I was re-watching Game 7 from last year's World Series. I don't root for either team,

but I remember being nervous on everybody's behalf, especially starting in the top of the night. How did you feel in that moment? That's a great question. I tell people, Brian, game three of the World Series is my favorite game, I think I've ever called. That was the 18 inning game. For a couple reasons. I think number one, World Series games, postseason games, you don't get to really have much fun, be yourself, because it is so

tense, and it is 100% about the game. You don't get to let yourself come through much. You get an 18- inning game, you can't help but throw your hands up a little bit and have fun. I mean, we're showing shots of guys with giant fruit platters and stuff in the dugout. So that was the perfect chance to have this amazing, gripping World Series game, but also have no choice but have some fun and be yourself. Game 7 was not that, because the world was going to end for somebody that night. Yeah, that one felt much more like sort of gripping the wheel tight and hanging on. At times, it felt like chasing my tail. I felt really good all postseason long.

I felt great game three, felt great in game six the night before. game seven i think just because of the heaviness of it and then the even if you even if you didn't have the back and forth of late it's my first game seven there's a lot at stake there everything at stake and then how frenetic it was and from one pitch to the next the pressure that you mentioned i'm excited for another chance to do a game seven because i don't feel like i was at my best you don't think you were at your best no i don't and i'm not trying to stand bag and say i was bad or anything i just there's a feeling when you're at your best that is hard to describe, and I didn't quite have that free feeling.

And I think that it's maybe natural. Especially not just my first time doing a game seven, but then having the game seven be like that. So I'm really excited to take what I learned from that and hopefully be able to apply it again soon. When you feel like you're at a minus level, let's say, or a level instead of a plus level, what are the kinds of things you're noticing?

It would be hard to tell, I think, for anybody listening, but just a fraction of a beat off and slow and behind. Not even necessarily calling the game, but when I'm talking about that pop, crack, go, it's pop, crack, go. Just that subtle, subtle lack of freedom and sort of overthinking, I think,

even without being conscious that I'm thinking, I think just the gripping the wheel too tight. And I'm sure if you talk to golfers or hitters or tennis players, it's sort of the same thing. Like when they're gripping the racket or the bat too tight, They're not just letting it flow. And it's almost like to describe that feeling of the A-minus or however you put it is just to tell you it's the absence of what you feel on the A-plus,

that freedom and that lack of thought. When you're in extras of Game 7 of the World Series, do you find your brain slows down? Does it speed up? What happens? Yeah, it's a good question. I think that throughout the back half of that game, probably more sped up than I wanted to be.

And I don't even know if it would be a sped-up. Sped-up is how I would describe it. Again, I go back to that word of freedom, just a little bit less free. And I think that's because, maybe that's always going to be the case in a game seven where any next pitch can be the one that ends the World Series, can be the one that people are going to talk about forever.

And I think that the human nature, when that's going to be the case, you're probably not going to be at your freest. Whatever I say is going to appear on television for the rest of my life. Which is the greatest thing about the job, too. Let's talk about how you got there. Raised in Potterville, Michigan, population about 3,000. This was a town known for its chicken gizzards.

That's right. Gizzard City, USA, which I had to do a little research when I was doing a presentation recently to figure out what that exactly is. Still don't totally get it. Something on the inside. side of the chicken that gets fried up. But yeah, Gizzard City, USA. We had a train to railment one time when I was in high school. That was a pretty big deal. CNN came into town. They shut the town down for a few days. But very nondescript, small town, small farm town. We got a couple gas stations,

one stoplight. There's a blimpie. There's a subway. There's a McDonald's. Or you can, if you're going to drive real fast, lunch hour, you can hop on the expressway, fly into Charlotte, and you can expand your boundaries big time. You got windies there. You got Burger King and even a Taco Bell, I think. Your dad was a high school football coach. Were you groomed to be a sports announcer or a quarterback? I think that probably more intentionally a quarterback because I was in all the meetings. I was at all the practices.

But I think by osmosis and subconsciously I was being groomed for a career of broadcasting. And any time that I've ever thought about I want to be this. or that when I grow up. That was the first thing that I thought of, I think, just because that's the world that I was kind of thrown into. Subconsciously, because you're around sports all the time. Yeah.

And hearing the behind-the-scenes stuff, hearing the strategy, those kinds of things? I think so. I do. Do you remember when you first articulated the idea of I want to call games when I grew up? Gary Thorne, NHL and ESPN, was my first guy that I remember just having this, him inspire this feeling in me.

When I heard his voice and they'd come on the air with those, you know, the teases on ESPN before the Stanley Cup finals, and they'd have, you know, you name it, Steve Eiserman and all these guys, you know, looking down, and then they'd raise their head in the shadows and everything, Gary Thorne's voice over that, and just the feeling I would have of the big game and what this meant, and being conscious of that being inspired by him and his voice. So that's the first time I remember being impacted and thinking there's something special of this job. And then I've said many times that Joe Buck is the first guy that I looked at and said, I want to be that. That's exactly what I want to do. I think he does the job the way I would like

to do it. He's doing exactly what I would one day dream of doing. And at first by osmosis, because he was calling all the biggest games when I was a kid, but then as I latched down and realized that's exactly what I wanted to do, he was the guy that I grew up wanting to be just like. Did you do the thing where you were playing a video game, you had turned down the volume? Oh, yeah. So that you could call the video game? Oh, yeah. Did you do that too? I don't think I did, but I think every announcer of your generation did. I think like the Bob Costas generation, it was turned down the television and call the game that was on television.

I did a little bit of that too. So there are the video games, there was TV like that, and then any imaginary game in the backyard or in the basement. My parents talked about thinking I was a little crazy looking out there and seeing me tackle myself while call the game. You know, hit myself in the helmet, dive down to the ground, and my parents would help me go extra far with you. imagination on that. My dad would bring home the liner, the field liner, being the coach, and he'd paint me my own little fields in the backyard. And in the basement, we painted a, and again, this is a very lower middle class house, not a ton of room, but we turned our basement in Michigan into a basketball court, probably eight-foot ceiling. So don't picture this giant

gym down there. Painted the four Michigan State basketball court, had little Tykes hoops on both ends. So my little fantasy games felt bigger and I was the announcer of all these little fake games too. Years later, you asked your dad to be your spotter, which means he's in the booth with you for every football game you call. Why'd you ask him to do that? It was, he was retiring from coaching. After me, my brother came through Potterville High School and he coached until he was finished. And then it just lined up where he was retiring from coaching, just teaching. And I thought, I don't remember when I first had the idea, but whenever I did, it was so obvious that it was a great way to spend time with him. And I knew that he would love it. He would love the spending time with me, but he would also love the purpose of it.

I tell you what, he treats being a spotter as if he's preparing to coach the state championship game. And he is harder on himself about his spotting than I think any of us are about our jobs. I'm like, Dad, just point to the guy that made the tackle and get it right, and then we'll go to the next play. But he, yeah, he prepares for these things like it's life or death. I think because he feels the pressure of he doesn't want his son to make a mistake on his account. That he caused. Yeah. So people that haven't been at a booth, a play happens.

There's a tackle. He's pointing at a roster. He's pointing at what? Spotting boards, spotting charts. So we spend all week putting together two deeps and everybody does them a little bit differently. Tim Brando's are like the size of a wall. Yeah, these giant cards. It's like the cheesecake factory menu.

It really is, yeah. I'm like, Tim, I'm overwhelmed. I don't know what to order on your board. I use a legal-sized folder, and I'll have one team's offense on the bottom, the other team's defense on the top, big names and numbers to help you identify. And then that, for me, that board serves as kind of the landing spot for all my prep during the week. And you get printed out for Sundays, and, yeah, the spotter stands to my left and points

to the guys that make the tackles. I have the ball carriers, because if I'm waiting on a spotter to tell me who has the ball, it's hard to call the game that way. But he helps me identify tacklers, tip passes, penalties, kind of the stuff around who's carrying the ball. Out of college, you got a job calling games for the minor league Montgomery, Alabama Biscuits, where the AA affiliate of the raise. Tell me if I have this right, someone from ESPN started listening to your games online?

Yeah. Two weeks into my time there, I got, and I, give the email address out, thinking it was for friends and families of the players. You know, they make up probably 80% of the audience for minor league baseball. And, you know, send an email to the booth if you want to say hi and get your name right out on the air. Two weeks into my time on the job, and I was 22 at this point, thinking I was pretty hot stuff, getting this double A job. I get this email, and I'm like, okay, this is different. This is not from a mom or a dad.

And I get about a paragraph in, and I'm thinking, wait a minute, what is this? This is like a critique of my first two weeks. weeks as a lead baseball announcer. And it wasn't too harsh, but it was definitely a critique and had some thoughts. And I'm like, who the hell is this guy? And I get to the bottom of the email. And it says, Dan Quinn, ESPN Communications. So I'm like, okay, this is interesting.

What turns out, Dan, he didn't work in talent or anything like that, but he was in PR at ESPN. He had injured his Achilles playing pickup soccer. And so it had surgery and was away from work for a few weeks. surfing the internet, he was a minor league baseball fan, saw something about the Montgomery Biscuits, and said, I got to get myself a hat. Got on the website, a game was going on. He saw the listen live link flashing on the webpage, clicked on that and said, this guy sounds good. I'll give this a listen. Dan kind of became a Biscuits fan, and after a year or so of becoming somewhat friends with him,

not with really, not with any kind of progress towards getting a job at ESPN, he said, hey, I bet I could get you a pre-game guest or two if you wanted, some of the ESPN baseball talent up here. And I was like, well, maybe this is a chance to shoot my shot here. I said, Dan, I don't really need pre-game guests, but could you introduce me to somebody at ESPNU? He said, sure, why didn't you ask? So I introduced me to some folks in Charlotte at ESPN Regional, ESPNU, and that eventually helped lead to crack in that door.

That is so wild. Because every 22-year-old is calling minor league baseball games. is like how do I get the attention of people at the networks. Yeah. And usually they don't wander onto the Montgomery Biscuits website and say, eh. Get a hat. Get a hat and give this guy a chance. I have so many little stories like that, Brian, where I'm such a product of stupid luck.

And I know that you set yourself up for that and you work hard and I did and I continue to. But so many instances like that were it's right place, right time. But I think the lesson there to not turn it into again sandbag. And the lesson there is you got to be ready for that. You've got to treat each time you go on the air like that time when Dan Quinn at ESPN could be listening. You sign with ESPN at 24. Fox, two years later.

It's happening very fast. What do you think popped out about your tape at that point in your career? Hmm. I always really obsessed over nailing the basics. Anytime I talk to young broadcasters now, it's like, hey, when it comes to the resume, and when it comes to the tape, you cannot give them a reason to throw yours out because these jobs are so amazing, everybody wants them. So even like the Montgomery Biscuits job, there were 140 people that applied for that.

They're going to, if I'm just picturing myself being the person sitting in the offices with 140 resumes and applications, I'm trying to whittle this down any way I can. So, okay, there's a typo, see ya. Put it in a tape, there's a weird, progress of highlights I don't like that either you have to nail the basics you cannot eliminate yourself you can't bench yourself so to speak

so I think that'd be the first thing I wasn't going to get thrown out because the stuff I could control I was going to nail and then from there I don't know I don't have a huge voice I don't you know that I was doing anything special I guess that would enjoy

asking that question to the people that gave me a shot because I don't know that I could tell you what made it any different than anybody else at that point. You've been at Fox a couple of years and then you started calling Dodgers Road games when Vince Cully was in his final season doing the home games. What did Scully say to you when he took the job? He talked and this is such a special thing but he I basically got secondhand advice from Red Barber. He said when he took over the job in 1950 he was 22 at that point Red's advice to him was don't water your own wine. So you bring yourself and you learn from others that you like,

but not at the detriment of you being you. So I think especially coming into that job, human nature is going to be, you're going to try to be the guy that you're following and that has done the job better than anybody's ever done it, no less. For 67 years. But his reminder to me to, yeah, you take what you want from the guys that have preceded you, Don't lose yourself.

I think it was huge advice. And I think if I had shown up on the job and tried to be VIN, it wouldn't work because there's only one VIN, and it would sound exactly like that. It sounds like somebody trying to be VIN Scully, and nobody wants that. In baseball, it's going to get exposed. If you're not being yourself, it's going to get exposed

because it's three hours a night every single night. Colin Dodger games, calling college football at Fox, number two baseball announcer at Fox behind Joe Buck. And then four years ago, Buck leaves Fox. goes to ESPN, shocking, I think, everybody in the known world. How'd you find out you were going to get to call the World Series after he left? It was a couple month progression there. Between the time, I still remember where I was, and my agent called and said, hey, you saw the news, Aikman is going to ESPN.

I was like, yeah, crazy, right? And he's like, dude, you're not thinking about what else this might mean. I was like, what are you, what? And that's when he said, there's talk that Buck may follow him. And this was, look, yeah, I did. The dream had always been to be the voice of the world series. Joe knew that was my dream. Joe had been telling me for four or five years, like,

this would be yours soon, buddy. I'm not doing this forever. And it was always like, okay, like, who's actually leaving this job? So to hear that there was a chance, I won't say I handled it great for the next, I think probably month and a half of pretty much silence. At some point over that month and a half, as I'm every single day refreshing Twitter

and looking for updates like anybody else is interested in this stuff every single day and not finding anything, it became clear that if he was going to leave, I was going to get the job, but we didn't know for sure that Fox was going to let him leave or that he was going to choose to leave. So when it eventually all came down that all those things fell into place, I was in Las Vegas for the Pac-12 basketball tournament, and Brad Zager, our executive producer and president at Fox, called and said, hey, do you mind if I come visit you? Vegas tomorrow and at this point I kind of knew what that was about. So I,

and again, Brian, this is, this is exactly what I dreamt of my entire life. So I journaled, really, took a really detailed journal of these couple days just because I knew that I'm going to want to look back and remember to the minute what these days were like. Meeting was about 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I had the Pact 12 championship game that night and like, shoot, this is going to be the worst broadcast in my life that I don't know, I'm going to focus on Oregon, Arizona or whatever it was. But, Went down to the lobby in the hotel. Brad was in there.

We were in an empty restaurant adjacent to the lobby, and we chatted for a few minutes, and then he said, well, what I'm really here for is to offer you a chance to be the voice of baseball, was the way he put it. And I broke down like somebody on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, I swear, last episode, just lost it.

Even though I knew it was coming to have that moment hit me where it's like, man, I had this very specific kind of crazy dream coming from a place where you typically don't think that way. And to have it hit me in that moment that I had realized that exact dream, it's one of the greatest moments of my life right there with the births of my children and getting married. And I could go on and do this job for another hundred years. And it'll be hard to top that moment when I find out that it was real.

It's funny being an announcer, isn't it? Because it's not like the Olympics where it's like, okay, we're all going to get in a hundred-yard dash. And whichever one of us runs the fastest is going to win the gold medal. It's like this stuff is controlled by who has broadcast rights, who renews those rights, whether somebody like Joe decides he don't want to call the World Series anymore as he teased a little bit,

or he just walks out the door and takes another job in a way that blows all of our minds. And that's how you get your dream job. Yeah. Not by winning some test or some competition like that. And you know what's also ironic. about the timing is that I right before then, I don't know if it was months or a year, but right before then, remember coming to this place where, because I'd always said, like, look, if I don't become the lead guy at a network, I feel like I've failed. That's been the dream. And not too far

before that. I remember coming to terms with it, like, hey, what an amazing life I have with at that point, three young, healthy kids, still young, healthy kids, but three young kids, healthy, half, family, beautiful wife, amazing house in town that I live in, the Dodger job amazing, loving the people I'm working with on college football and Major League Baseball. If I don't ever get the World Series, awesome. How great is this what I'm getting to do right now? And a month or two after I remember sitting down and thinking that way and even writing that down, it broke.

Do you normally keep a journal? I do, yeah. What do you get out of it? I use it for a few different things. I have what is like a daily planner, weekly planner. I'm kind of an obsessive planner. Sometimes I wonder if I actually do stuff or do I just actually plan to do stuff. But I got a journal that I, you know, like the planner journal where I'll jot down quotes

or things that I read that I want to make sure that I can go back in reference. And I've got a bunch of notebooks too just with random thoughts that I'll put in. And I also use in that daily journal planner. I'll go back each night after the broadcast and jot down a few thoughts and grade myself on a few things to turn it in. I think what we track is what we grow. And so to be able to pay attention to things I'm working on and put a number on those things to see progress or the opposite, that's something I do each night too to tie it back to the job. You often hear people these days say baseball is back.

To what extent is it back? To the extent I think that in a lot of the extent that in a lot of, large way Otani has brought it back. I think having an evil empire is good for any sport. So the Dodgers becoming that, this big evil empire with the biggest story, the individual story in Otani. I think the Yankees being in the World Series to face the Dodgers two years ago, what a dream matchup that is from a national eyeball perspective. And then how great last year's World Series was. I think that quietly, Fox executives would whisper to you that they'd always feared, what if the Blue Jays are on the World Series? That's going to be not good for us, not good for ratings,

but it was amazing. I think that that, I think that shows you that while Otani might have brought baseball back or Benoit sparked bringing baseball back, I think along with the pitch clock and the way the game is played now and a bunch of other good stars as well, I think while he was the biggest reason that it maybe rose up. I think it's just so healthy now for all those reasons. And I think that in the World Series, that's not just the Otani effect last year.

The Blue Jays being half of the equation and everybody's still watching a 30-some million. Thirty million, we're not watching it just to watch Otani. So, yeah, I think the evidence is there statistically, and I think that you feel it if you watch the sport. You mentioned Vince Kelly's advice

when you got the Dodgers job. Be yourself. Now, that's good advice. all of us, but you're not hosting a podcast. You're not doing stand-up comedy. What does being yourself as a play-by-play man actually entail? That's such a great question and distinction to make. I think what it entails in this job is allowing it to come through when appropriate, as opposed to, I never like the idea of your style or whether that's catchphrase or thinking that you are this or that on the air. You're you. The game is the game. You call the game, do that justice, and then you allow yourself to come through. That also, though, is easier said than done.

I think especially coming in for me, taking over for Vin, and being the young guy and not wanting to make any kind of mistake. I talked about gripping the wheel too tight in Game 7 of the World Series. I gripped the wheel pretty tight for a few years on this job, just because I knew what a responsibility it was and I didn't want anybody to think that I was an idiot and I knew that I was coming in kind of up against it being the guy to follow the legend and 26 or 27 or whatever I was at that point I was very conscious of that knowing that I had to sort of I don't know if it's true but I felt that I had to overcome my age and prove that I belonged in that job. Heavy amount of imposter syndrome that I think that anybody that's admitting it probably carries a fair amount in jobs like this

So allowing, like, having that stuff fall away to allow yourself to come through, as opposed to exerting yourself or exerting any kind of style onto the broadcast. How is somebody who doesn't know you know that it's the real Joe Davis versus the character that maybe a younger Joe Davis thought he needed to play on television? I think that it's just when you hear a person instead of a broadcaster. I think that I, in trying to, in gripping the wheel tight and in trying to be perfect, I was more of a broadcast robot. And probably didn't get much wrong,

but I probably didn't have much fun either. So I think through the years, I'm still not the craziest, most fun, laughing guy on the air, but hopefully people have felt like, maybe especially in L.A., where they hear me more nights, feel like they've gotten to know me

just in the moments between the moments where I do allow the laugh or the joke to come through. But again, it's allowing it as opposed to, like, bringing it and putting it on the game. I remember talking to Joe Buck, who got big jobs when he was young, too. And he said that process of being yourself took years and years and years. So you still consider it ongoing? Oh, absolutely.

I do. And like I talk about going home each night and scoring myself and grading how I did. Really, what it comes down to what I'm grading is how free was I? How much did I allow myself to be myself? Because at this stage, I think I've got the fundamentals down. I don't need to worry about. and like I've had a lot of, I've thought about this a lot too. Nobody at home really gives a, you know what, about if I'm nailing the,

because you come up and you think I got to become a master calling the basis clearing doubling the gap. If I can nail that, I'm the guy. Like I've got it. Nobody at home gives a shit about that, right? Like they want to hear a guy who's having fun and feel like they're enjoying the game with them. So what am I doing? If I've got that, if I've nailed the basics and feel like I got the X's and O's a play-by-play, down. My job is to bring some joy to people who are watching this game and be a fun listen.

So letting go a little bit on that fundamental side and then just allowing myself to be free and be human and have fun where it calls for it, I think, is the goal that I'm shooting for, but then I'm still very much a work and progress on. It sounds as much as anything like knowing that you're going to be able to call the base clearing double just fine. That's going to come out. For sure. I think freedom is on the side of the work. Freedom is on the other side of the preparation. So there's definitely something

to that. If you had told me as a 22-year-old, go be free and have fun, I probably would have said, well, I got to figure out how to call the basis clearing double first. So that's a great point. Few odds and ends. When you read the million stories, speaking of Twitter, speculating about Greg Olson's future. Olson's your partner on Fox. What do you think? I think that I just, I'm going to enjoy every game I get with him. I think that it's a matter of time before he gets a lead gig. which everybody knows he deserves. I know that even the bosses of Fox know that, right? That he's a lead guy, and it's just those jobs don't open up.

I think when they do, I would assume he'll be right at the top of everybody's list, and I'm going to be selfishly bummed whenever that day comes, that he does get a lead gig elsewhere, but we have so much fun together. So I see those rumors like everybody else does, and I know they're real and I know that it's going to lead to something eventually, but it just makes me double down on loving every game I get with them

even more than I already do. What did he unlock about broadcasting, do you think? Hmm. Like, why is he kind of on his own level? Sure. He, I think as a, he has as the foundation,

just this amazing energy. He doesn't drink, any caffeine and he walks into every room as if he's had like 400 milligrams before he walked in. So he just has this vibration, this vibrancy of life that he begins with as a communicator. And then he can speak expertly from so many different perspectives. I think the, you know, the idea is that a coach can give you the most perspectives, right? But Greg, I mean, it's obviously you can talk like a tight end if he wants to do that, but that's not what he does.

He can talk about it from the quarterback's perspective. He can zoom out and talk from the O.C.'s perspective. He can flip it around and do the same thing on defense. But he can also talk from the head coach's perspective, and he can talk from the roster building perspective and the analytics perspective and then the human side. He can come at it from whatever angle that he wants, and he does so. Like he slaloms from one to the other so seamlessly that you don't even realize it's happening.

In one moment it's this and the next moment it's that, but in all the moments it's expert and it's fun. You talk about the energy. I saw him one time on site when he was working with Burkhard. And his energy reminded me of like a fraternity rush chairman. So I'm like, hey guys, I'm here. Let's talk football. Let's go. Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

I've thought like Skinnier Chris Farley. Yeah, I could see that. He was looking for hair gel when I saw him. He always is, and he never finds it until, I don't know if he's ever, he's got some hair spray. The hair is always a mess. We go on at 1 o'clock, right? The hair is a mess until 1259-20. And then he's like, oh, shit, like, we're coming out in the air.

And Pete Macheska, our producer's like, 90 seconds. And Greg's like, looking in the mirror. He's like, what a great hair day. What a great hair day. I'm like, well, it's not terrible anymore, but I guess we're going to, I don't know if I call it great. I think it's arable. He's got a little hairspray, grab a little mirror that we have sitting there in the booth,

and he's got it ready to rock. But he's constantly disheveled until he needs to be a little less disheveled. And he always gets there. Here's something I didn't know. Your brother won an Oscar this year? Where did you watch the ceremony? I was doing the World Baseball Classic.

I think I was mid-game in the semifinal or the championship when it came across that he won. That's amazing. So you're calling video game baseball. and football as a kid, and he's walking around with a camera shooting of stuff? So you mentioned my dad being the head football coach, small town football coach, you are everything. You're in charge of the camera, too. So we had the camcorder, the program's camcorder, that you record practices and games with.

And my brother snuck that out of the house and make his own movies as a 7, 8-year-old. And his famous story is one of those first trips out into the backyard. He dropped the football camcorder into a stream and ruined it. But credit to my parents. They didn't scold him for that. I'm sure he got scolded. But they deserve credit for pulling the lever of seeing that we had dreams and doing everything in their power to foster and encourage those dreams.

Your sister's a writer as well? Yeah, she's an amazing writer. I would think it's a matter of time before we know her name and we're reading her stuff. That's a pretty good yield for a 10 of 3,000, the family of the football coach. Your brother's name is Sam and it's Best Live Action Short, which you can see on Netflix. Finally, I want to do some word association with you. Some other big play-by-play announcers.

Tell me what makes them unique. Everybody in this tier is really good at their job. Are you going to go through specific names? I'm going to go through specific names. Here we go. Mike Tarrico. Oh, love Mike. Mike specific to me is he's been one of my greatest mentors,

one of the first guys to make me think I had a shot to do this at the level that I dreamt of doing it. his command of and I like the low-hanging fruit answer is he does so many different things but that's not what I mean when I say this his command of wherever he needs to go I think it's probably best exemplify when he does his Olympic stuff because you got to know a lot of stuff

you got to know politics and history of countries and it's not just the athletes and where they went to school like a lot of times we got to know on NFL his command of so many different pieces of information, his ability to go to those things aggressively without hesitation, is second to none. How about Jim Nance? I told Jim this.

I met Jim for the first time this winter. His warmth, his combination of warmth and ability to make it sound big, I think is unique. Because I think you can make it sound big without, having it be a warm feeling and you can have a warm feeling without sounding big but his ability to combine those things i think is really special how about joe buck joe for me as i told you is the one who i grew up saying i want to do it like that and the biggest thing that i wanted to be able to emulate was in the big moments his ability to nail them to capture them to capture them and then get out of

the way and i'm not saying he's good at laying out because we all lay out we all we all go quiet when the crowd is roaring, but his ability to not just tell you what happened, but succinctly tell you what happened with the appropriate context as it happened, to have those calls that are going to stand up forever. Nobody in my lifetime has done it like him. Among people that cover broadcasting for a living, laying out is got to be the most overrated skill that they cite over and over again. It was like, there was a huge moment, Game 7 of the World Series, and,

He called it and he didn't just talk constantly for the next two minutes. Like, yeah, what would you think they were going to do? Yeah, right. And I think that everybody's pretty good at that by now. Right. I don't think that's a big stretch. But people get saluted for that all the time. Yeah, it's as if it's like somebody just picked up being a media critic.

And that's the first thing they learned was something that was a thing, like the first day of media critic school. They're like, that's what I'm going to go at. One way or the other, I'm going to praise it or I'm going to kill them. That is the first day of media critic school. Yeah. You know, go back and watch Vinny and Gibby in. in 1988 and he didn't say anything for like two minutes. Right.

This is kind of been a thing in broadcasting for a while. Yeah. How about Gus Johnson? I think it's obvious. It's the energy. I think that it's underrated though about Gus how big he makes it sound. I don't think that it's just the energy and the, you know, the highlight calls. I think that when you turn a game on and you hear Gus, you know this is a big game.

How about KB, Kevin Burkart? He hasn't been in that seat as long as some of these other people. so maybe he's a little more informed in people's minds. He's so good. And he were, Kevin and I are close. I think that we bonded through that stretch of unknown when it was known that Joe might leave, but not for sure and what would happen if he did.

Kevin was sitting there as the heir apparent in NFL. And we could relate at that time with each other like we couldn't relate with any other humans in the world. So we got really close through that process and have stayed close. He on the air, he's so good. good at making his partners comfortable. He's so good at, like I talk about wanting to be free. I always feel like KB's free to be himself. And he sounds big. He sounds big. He's like the

fundamentals are great. But then he also lets himself come through so, to me, with just so much ease that I envy. My favorite take of his is whenever he does the pregame stand-up, he'll look into the camera and he always smiles when he looks into a camera. Have you noticed that? Every time he keeps the camera he goes. He gives that little Jim Halpert smile. That's awesome. And then looks over and then looks the camera goes. There's a pattern to it. There's a little bit of a pattern to it. I'm not going to be able to unsee it now, Brian. That's all I'm going to see with him. Another guy who does football and baseball, both and hockey, Sean McDonough. Oh, man. Sean's another one who I grew up saying that. Like, that's the guy right there.

I grew up a big college basketball fan, so listening to him and Raff and Jay Billis on Big East basketball. He is right there, I think, at the very very, top of the list of the guys where you turn it on and you don't even have to think you hear it and you know that it's big and Sean has become a good friend of mine too through the years which I feel like I'm name dropping on all these and I think we assume that you guys all know each other I guess but like I know these guys from the perspective of they were all these heroes for me as a kid so it's like the coolest thing that that I have now is to be able to say that these heroes of mine are mentors and friends of mine. It's one of the most special things in my career journey that

I couldn't have fathomed. You know, I, like, I had these dreams of doing specific things and hope that I would do that. It's almost like becoming friends with these guys is even crazier than achieving the specific dreams of calling things themselves. With McDonough, you talk about the big game quality. Is there something in his voice, or have we just watched Michigan, Michigan State, you know, Joe Carter hitting it over the fence in the early 90s. Like, what is it about him that makes it sound like a big game? Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's probably a little bit of both because I'm trying to think of if you turned on,

and it's hard to even put yourself into this headspace, but if you turned Sean on and had never heard him before, would it hit you as big? And I think it would. So I'm trying to think about, you know, I listen to young broadcasters all the time. And you know it when you're, you turn it on. Like, you know, there's a sound. So I think it's a little bit of both. I think that

you come in with that, but then it feeds on itself as you get a chance in those big moments and hopefully do them justice. We then begin to associate that voice with those moments. Yeah, it's funny because it's a little bit subtle with him. You know, Brent Musburger, it sounded like a big game, but Brent was chewing scenery

in a way that I don't think Sean McDonnelly is. It's a very curious quality. Yeah. All right, let's imagine 20 years from now, I have the next broadcasting wonderkind in that chair. And we're talking about laying out and what a great skill that is. And then we get around to Joe Davis. What adjectives would you like him to mention about you that first come to the top of his mind when he thinks about your career? I'd hope that he would say that I did justice to the big moments because I think once

you get into these lead jobs, there's a responsibility to do that. Your call is going to be what it becomes synonymous with the moment. And when you do it right, I think it can either elevate how the moment stands the test of time or diminish it. Not that you're ever going to take anything away from the guy who hit the home run or the guy who scored the touchdown. But I think if you don't really nail the call, really do it justice, you are selling that person that hit the home run. home runner scored the touchdown a little bit short. And maybe that's breathing too much into my job, and it's not that profound. I keep a simple, stupid. But I do think there's responsibility there. So I would hope that 20 years the kids sitting here would say that I've done that a few times.

And I hope that he would say that he enjoyed listening to me. Because I think that if I'm enjoying myself and if I'm enjoying, if I'm letting myself be myself, I'm letting myself be free, I would hope that he would associate me with the kinds of things I'm talking about like Jim Nance, like Kevin Burkart, where these guys are so free and pleasant and warm and so clearly and comfortably themselves. All right, week one on Fox, Joe Davis and Greg Olson will hopefully be having good hair days, as they call Falcon Steelers baseball postseason starts September 29 just around the corner. Joe, thanks for coming on the press box.

Ryan, it's so much fun, man. I can nerd out on this stuff all day. All right, one email I want to read you before we get out of here, do the headline. Daniel Deacon sent us a note about our conversation about Pablo Torre. And you and I were talking about how literary the Walkdale Lipton law firm report was. That was unusually, to our eyes, well written. This is what Daniel Deacon writes. He is, by the way, an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School.

I might list his qualifications here. Anyway, Mr. Deacon writes, what seems less well understood is that the job of a big law litigator is largely to write persuasively and well. Very little of your time is spent arguing in court. For many kinds of litigation practices, your bones are made as a writer. And particularly when it comes to legal briefs and other pieces of persuasive writing, the kind of legalese you might imagine when you think of legal writing

is highly out of favor. Judges are generalists and may not know very little about an area. You need to explain things to them like they're normal humans. Over the last couple decades or so, legal writing, even and perhaps especially in fora, such as the Supreme Court of the United States, has become more and more conversational, sometimes even verging on casual.

And he continues, you'll still find legal documents that read kind of ridiculous. quote, herewith comes the plaintiff, dot, dot, dot, dot. Usually from lawyers, we might politely call less sophisticated, walktel isn't filing, that kind of stuff. It's good information. Yeah. David and I are analyzing journalism, and we should have been reading a lot more big law.

I'm definitely going to read more legal briefs moving forward. This is great news. Speaking of briefs, it's time for David Shoemaker, guess is a strain pun headline. Yeah. Our last headline about disappearing sea otters on the west coast was Oregon but not forgotten. Today's headline, David, comes

from another loyal listener of this podcast. It's Ross Ketchi. Ketchi, excuse me, Ross. Send in something from the Boston Globe. Story was about Trump's Canada tariffs. Trump's Canada tariffs. I want you to think

of some words that were uttered whenever the Hart family stepped into the wrestling ring. As you ponder, what was the Boston Globe's strain pun headline? The heart, like, Brett Hart and Stu Hart? Well, Brett. Owen and his brothers, what were some of the words? The best there is, the best there are, uh, uh, maybe over the loudspeaker, some words.

Um, so we didn't sing the Soviet national anthem. No, I know, the Canadian, oh, please rise for the Canadian. Oh, oh, Canada. Uh, so these are tariffs. It's bad, so it's not Oh, Canada. Whoa, Canada? Yeah. Uh-oh, Canada. No, uh-oh, Canada.

That's great. Uh-oh, Canada from the Boston Globe. He's David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Produce the magic by Isaiah Blakely and John Jones. Follow us on IG at Pressbox Ringer. David, I will see you next Thursday when we will celebrate a Longhorn's victory together. And indulge in more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you that. See you later, Brian.