Fox’s Joe Davis on calling the Bills-Vikings thriller, Bill Cowher speaks out and more NFL media thoughts

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As he flew back home to Los Angeles from Buffalo (with a quick stop in Detroit) on Sunday evening, Fox Sports game-caller Joe Davis reflected on the best NFL game he’s ever been part of as a broadcaster — a back-and-forth second half and overtime that saw Minnesota rally from a 17-point deficit to defeat Buffalo, 33-30, in overtime. The final two minutes of regulation included a Buffalo goal-line stand with 49 seconds left only to see Bills quarterback Josh Allen fumble the next snap and Minnesota recover for a touchdown for a 30-27 lead. The Bills then marched down the field for a game-tying field goal with two seconds left in regulation. After Minnesota settled for a field goal in overtime, the Vikings ultimately won it when cornerback Patrick Peterson picked off Allen in the end zone with 1:12 left.

“It was amazing in that it felt over four or five times only to swing back the other way,” Davis said from many miles above the ground. “In the span of about one minute of game time at the end of regulation, Buffalo lost the game, won the game, lost the game, and tied the game. Stunning play after stunning play. When you combined that with the environment in Buffalo and the anticipation that came with two division leaders playing, it’s gotta be the best NFL game I’ve done. It’s also on a short list of the best I’ve been lucky enough to do in any sport.”

As I noted below, the production crew, led by producer Pete Macheska and director Artie Kempner, really delivered late, including replays that helped amplify the insanity of the final stretch.

“The truck deserves complete credit for us being on top of the missed call near the end of regulation on the Gabe Davis catch,” Davis said. “(Analyst) Daryl (Johnston) and I are doing our best to stay on top of the next play with the game on the line, so in a situation like that when it’s ‘play on,’ that’s all those guys in the truck including our tape room and (rules analyst) Dean Blandino back in L.A. Pete was guiding us through telling that story while also focusing on the game-tying field goal that was coming.”

Davis said the day was also memorable for him for barely making his flight back home.

“The last improbable play of the day was our convoy leaving the stadium at 5:10 p.m. ET with 50,000 other people, traveling 20 minutes to the airport, and still somehow making a 5:55 p.m. ET flight,” Davis said. “Big thanks to the New York State Troopers and my dad. My dad is my spotter and was driving our getaway car.”

GO DEEPER

Justin Jefferson immense as Vikings outlast Bills in ‘craziest game I’ve been a part of’

Some additional Week 10 NFL media thoughts:

• It remains rare to see high-profile NFL analysts offer specific criticism of NFL owners — and pointed criticism of owners during a game broadcast comes at the same frequency as blood moons. But on Sunday, CBS “NFL Today” analyst Bill Cowher really dialed it up on Colts owner Jim Irsay’s decision to hire Jeff Saturday as his new head coach. Cowher gave an impassioned two-minute speech — with a ton of specific detail — that he says was the same one he gave during the show’s production meeting on Friday.

“It’s something that hits close to home, and I felt an obligation to speak on behalf of the coaching profession,” Cowher said on Sunday night. “I felt I needed to make a statement. Everyone (in the cast) was very respectful. Everyone had an opinion on it. But (“NFL Today” producer) Drew (Kaliski) was great about making that segment a little bit longer to allow some extra time. Being here for 16 years at CBS, the one thing I’ll say is they will give you the time to be able to express your thinking.

“Devin McCourty is here straight from the locker room,” Cowher continued. “Nate (Burleson) isn’t long from coming off the field. We have a great opportunity to get a cross-section of opinions on how this may or may not play out. But the bottom line is, I’m the one coach that’s up here. I spent five years as a player, seven years as an assistant coach, and 15 years as a head coach. I have great respect for the coaching profession and understand all the things that go on when people lose their jobs. It’s never easy, but it’s part of a profession we get into. But there’s certain ways of doing certain things and commitments that people make that when things are not done properly, it needs to be pointed out. Regardless of how this plays, it was a travesty in terms of how this unfolded.”

• Johnston called the final 120 seconds of regulation between the Bills and Vikings the most amazing two minutes of football he had ever seen. It wasn’t hyperbole. Macheska and Kempner really delivered. Even a small detail like seeing Minnesota receiver Justin Jefferson’s feet stay in bounds on a clutch overtime catch was great for viewers. Blandino nailed the replay of Buffalo’s Davis bobbling a key reception on the Bills’ game-tying drive and was clear that officials had erred by not reviewing it. “It’s too big a play not to stop it,” Blandino said. Good stuff.

• You want a broadcaster to live up to the big moments — and Davis did here:

And also here:

• I’m planning to do a podcast in the next couple of weeks that offers a top-down view of Amazon’s NFL coverage as it hits the three-quarter mark of the 2022 season. That’s usually a good time to weigh in with some perspective. Last week’s viewership for a game with little national appeal (Falcons–Panthers) averaged a season-low 6.80 million viewers. Sports Media Watch said it was the lowest-watched “Thursday Night Football” game since a Week 4 Broncos-Jets game in 2020. Amazon said its first-party measurement, which is proprietary to Amazon and would include alternative broadcasts and Twitch viewing, measured eight million viewers. The short answer is the game was a dog.

Amazon’s NFL broadcasts are averaging 9.65 million viewers through nine games per Nielsen, which is a couple of million lower than what they promised advertisers. (Amazon says they are averaging 11.4 million, according to Amazon’s first-party measurement.) I expect those numbers to go up with better games late in the season. Where Amazon has a good story to tell is in its demographics. The company says the median age of the TNF on Prime audience is 46 years old, which is eight years younger than the NFL average. Broadcasts are averaging 2.24 million viewers in the 18-34 demographic, which Amazon says is up 20 percent versus last year’s Thursday broadcasts on FOX, NFL Network and Prime Video (1.86 million).

• What is the ceiling for the NFL games in Europe when it comes to interest back in the States? The NFL Network drew 5.5 million viewers for the Giants–Packers game from London on Oct. 9. That’s the current viewership record for a Europe game — which is a little low for the NFL to really be satisfied. I watched some of Tampa Bay’s win over Seattle from Munich’s Allianz Arena — the open press box made the sound quality for viewers very challenging at times — which was the NFL’s first-ever regular season game in Germany. I’ll be curious to see the final viewership number. Our Greg Auman covered the game — and wrote a great preview piece — and said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell would not be surprised if the league expands from their initial commitment of four games in Germany in four years. The NFL says Germany has now surpassed Britain as the NFL’s largest market in Europe, and that was obvious from the atmosphere.

Related: Listen to the stadium sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads:”

• I asked Cowher what he thought of the final minutes of regulation and overtime in Bills-Vikings.

“I’ve never seen anything like the display that Kirk Cousins and Justin Jefferson put on,” Cowher said. “I feel the frustration that Josh Allen has had. We’ve watched the last couple of weeks Josh getting into the red zone and it reminds me a little bit where Patrick Mahomes was a year ago, that sometimes they get a little bit careless, try to do too much. Pulling back a little bit will be something Josh will be able to do. Those are two teams that have playmakers at the receiver position, playmakers at the quarterback position and their defenses are very good. These are playoff teams, and this is kind of murky waters that comes during the course of an NFL season. Everybody has to work through them. Sometimes it takes the depths of a valley to reach the heights of a mountain. Sometimes you have to get knocked down before you really get back up and stand straight.”

The Ink Report

1. “College GameDay” executives have always answered questions about the future of the show post-Lee Corso with thoughtfulness. Both on and off the record, they’ve been consistent about working around Corso’s desires, health and schedule given the realities of his age. You’ve never heard any leaks about ESPN management pursuing a replacement because no talks have ever gotten that far. Rather, they have always said the show will simply evolve whenever that time comes. Corso missed his third consecutive show this week — the expectation is that the 87-year-old analyst will return later this year — but the last couple of Saturdays, you saw a blueprint of how the show might close in a post-Corso universe. The realities of this time slot make it very important to have a strong draw to close the show — as Corso’s famous picking segment has been — because “GameDay” serves as a big lead-in into the noon ET game ESPN is broadcasting. The celebrity picker for “GameDay” — as long as it’s someone with broad appeal — gives the show its best attempt to keep an audience until they roll into the game broadcast asset of Corso’s famous head gear segment. It gives you options on whose voice should be the most profound when the show leaves the air. On Saturday, Corso technically made the last pick as relayed by Kirk Herbstreit. It was a good way to close, even though Corso went big on Texas over TCU.

1a. Episode 254 of the Sports Media Podcast features a conversation with Sean Keeley, the editorial strategy director at Comeback Media and the creator of Nunes Magician. Last week Keeley wrote a piece, “What happens to sports media if Twitter dies?” and that’s the topic of our conversation. In this podcast, we discuss Sean’s piece with multiple sports media members and what they believed the impact of Twitter is; what the social media site’s ending would mean for them individually; the impact of Twitter on careers; the wave of impersonations, including Adam Schefter and LeBron James, on Twitter and what it means; the utility of sports Twitter; how advertisers see the product right now; how individual sports media people monetized a large Twitter following; what a Twitter alternative for sports might look like; whether any large sports media organization would direct its employees to leave the site and more.

You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and more.

2. Episode 255 of the Sports Media Podcast features a conversation with Deirdre Fenton, executive director of Unscripted at Meadowlark Media. In this podcast, Fenton discusses “Good Rivals,” a three-part docuseries (Fenton is the executive producer) on the rivalry between the Mexican and American national men’s soccer teams that debuts on Amazon Prime Video on Nov. 24; how Fenton defines her role at Meadowlark Media; the making of “Good Rivals” and the challenge of getting Mexican team players; what an executive producer does in totality; the Meadowlark/Skydance Sports upcoming documentary on Diana Taurasi; if women’s sports stories are an untapped market; the projects Meadowlark hopes to do heading forward; serving as a producer on the Academy Award-winning documentary “OJ: Made in America” and the BAFTA-winning “Hillsborough”; how a young person can get to a position like Fenton’s and more.

You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and more.

3. Tim Bella, a Washington Post staff writer and editor, has published a biography of Charles Barkley, the Hall of Fame basketball player and longtime TNT NBA analyst. Bella said he thought Barkley was worthy of a book treatment exploration in 2022 because “you don’t see many people have a grip on that level of relevancy and respectability for as long as he’s had — especially not when they’ve been arrested multiple times, gotten into bar fights, throwing guys through windows, often sharing unpopular opinions, and come out the other side as well as he’s been able to do.”

Bella said he reached out to Barkley’s representatives but Barkley declined to take part in the book. I asked Bella what areas he would have focused on had Barkley agreed to sit down with him.

“If he would have agreed to speak, I would have mostly wanted to get into his upbringing in Leeds, Alabama, and his family life,” Bella said. “I would have wanted to talk about his mother, Charcey, and grandmother, Johnnie Mae, the women who made and raised him. All you see from Charles is because of them. I would have wanted to talk about his father, Frank, and how they took a strained, nonexistent relationship and were able to make peace with each other after years. Charles had a lot of anger toward his father for leaving him and Charcey when Chuck just turned 1. I would have asked about his brothers, especially his brother Darryl, whom he has often referred to when speaking on addiction. I would have wanted to talk about his wife, Maureen, and daughter, Christiana, both of whom he’s largely kept out of the spotlight. There are so many other topics I would have wanted to dig into — race, politics, Michael Jordan, his gambling and drinking, TNT — but family would have been the most important.”

3a. Rest in peace, Fred Hickman.

4. Sports pieces of note:

• SI’s Jon Wertheim on Robert Griffin III.

• The World Cup collision is coming to Qatar. The question is how hard will it hit? By Bruce Arthur of The Toronto Star.

• Via Bruce Feldman of The Athletic: Biff Poggi, Jim Harbaugh’s consigliere, is the most interesting man in coaching.

• Amazon’s silence on Kyrie Irving-publicized movie is pathetic. By Andrew Marchand of the New York Post.

• ESPN’s Doug Glanville wrote a poem for Dusty Baker.

• This was very good from CBS’ James Brown on hate and antisemitism.

• Gunshots shattered her hoop dreams. Now she wants them back. By David Gardner of The Washington Post.

• Jane Gross, Sportswriter Who Opened Locker Room Doors, Dies at 75. By Richard Sandomir of The New York Times.

Non-sports pieces of note:

• 44 indelible images from more than a century of Boston Globe photography. By Stan Grossfeld.

• FTX held less than $1 billion in liquid assets against $9 billion in liabilities. By Antoine Gare of Financial Times.

• The Crypto Ponzi Scheme Avenger. By David Segal of The New York Times.

• Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter. By Kate Conger, Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu of The New York Times.

• How Tennessee Disenfranchised 21 Percent of Its Black Citizens. By Bianca Fortis of ProPublica.

• The Ferrari Fugitives. By Brett Popplewell for Toronto Life.

• She was a celebrated oncologist. Why did she hide her breast cancer until it was too late? By Jessica Bartlett of The Boston Globe.

• Why Elon Musk’s Quest to Revive Twitter Is Likely to Fail. By Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal.

• She decoded Nazi messages and helped win World War II. Now she’s 101. By Dave Kindy of The Washington Post.

• Years after brothers serve 20 years for rape they said they did not commit, judge tosses wrongful conviction. By Roy S. Johnson of Al.com.

• Elon Musk’s Twitter Is a Scammer’s Paradise. By Matt Burgess of Wired.

• We got Twitter ‘verified’ in minutes posing as a comedian and a senator. By Geoffrey Fowler of The Washington Post.

• U.S. intel report says key Gulf ally meddled in American politics. By John Hudson of The Washington Post.

(Photo: Isaiah Vazquez /Getty Images)



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