Have enough confidence not to talk

Joe Buck is one of the best sports announcers ever, but even he is always trying to get better.

That push for improvement is made easier by all the technological leaps that have come during his broadcasting career. In particular, the development of high-quality on-field audio technology allows him to embrace “dead air” more than ever before and let what’s happening in the stadium carry a big moment on the broadcast.

In an interview with Andrew Marchand on the Marchand Sports Media podcast, released ahead of Buck’s final regular-season NFL broadcast for ESPN, Buck advocated for young announcers to embrace the fact that “there is no such thing as dead air anymore” and to “have enough confidence not to talk.”

“For younger broadcasters, you’re always afraid of dead air,” Buck explained. “Because I think in your mind, and we’re all insecure … and you think, especially when you’re young if I don’t talk here, the audience thinks I don’t know what to say. So I’ve got to say something, I’ve gotta go 100 miles per hour, and if I don’t say something, if I let it breathe, so to speak, it’s telling the audience that I shouldn’t be sitting here. And that is not true. In fact, it’s the opposite if you really think about it. If you have enough confidence to not talk, it’s really powerful.”

Many of the biggest moments in sports are punctuated by silence in the booth. Particularly in baseball and football, where the action pauses between plays, announcers can cue up the crowd and the athletes and then let it ride.

Think of Joe Davis’ call of Freddie Freeman’s World Series grand slam last October or Jim Nantz’s nod to Brent Musberger on Kansas City’s Super Bowl-winning touchdown, which fans accused Tony Romo of stepping on, and brevity is the key. The greats deliver the call, lay out the stakes, and then get out of the way.

Buck explained that They can do that because of the level of audio they get from field-level nowadays.

“With the kind of audio that we all have on these networks, there is no such thing as dead air anymore,” Buck said. “Dead air doesn’t exist because the microphones are so good, there’s so much natural sound that that can carry it, and you don’t need to talk over it.”

Back to the Romo side of Nantz’s Super Bowl call on CBS, part of the job of an analyst is to read the moment as well. Most of the time, the analyst is vital to fans understanding what’s happening in the game. But in the biggest moments, it is obvious what’s happening. All that matters is for the play-by-player to sum up the moment and bring energy.

Buck encouraged broadcasters to rest on the fact that they can always circle back to the analysis. Even for Romo, after the Chiefs’ game-winner, there is so much airtime between the end of the game and the trophy ceremony to break down that winning play.

“I stink if I talk over that (moment),” Buck said. “There’s always going to be time. Until you go off the air, you’re gonna have time to say it; you’re gonna have time to analyze it.”

In the first several years of his ESPN deal, Joe Buck has been sidelined beyond the Wild Card round of the NFL postseason. He does not call baseball anymore. But with an ABC Super Bowl coming up in 2027, Buck is still working to perfect his craft- and wants to make everyone around him better.

[Marchand Sports Media]