PHOENIX — Joe Buck was in a Paris bar during the NFC Championship game, watching the Fox broadcast of the game between the Eagles and 49ers on his phone. For Super Bowl LVII this Sunday, he will be in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at a party.
“I’ll watch and root for the guys to do great,” Buck told The Post.
“The guys” are Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen, who succeeded Buck and Troy Aikman as Fox’s top NFL game-callers after Buck and Aikman left for ESPN’s “Monday Night Football.”
Buck had one year left on his Fox deal. After trying to keep him with a $12 million-per-year offer, however, Fox allowed Buck to leave last March, though 2022 was a Super Bowl season for the network.
If Buck had stayed at Fox — which has two of the next three Super Bowls — he would have put himself in a better position to surpass Al Michaels’ and Pat Summerall’s record of 11 Super Bowls called on TV.
Buck, 53, has been on the TV mic for six Super Bowls, which means he will still have a chance to match the record of the legendary Michaels and Summerall. He will call Super Bowl 61 in February 2027 for ABC/ESPN.
When his NFL total is combined with the 24 World Series that Buck called for Fox, he could go down as the most statistically accomplished play-by-player in American sportscasting history.
Who is the best is, of course, subjective. It still means a lot to some.
Jim Nantz, for example, has already stated his goal is to call 50 Masters, which, if he accomplishes it, would mean talking about the azaleas in Augusta until he is 75 in 2035.
Buck said he doesn’t want to become — to borrow a classic from Mike Francesa — a “compilah.”
“No, I don’t think like that,” Buck said. “I don’t know why. It seems like it’s something that other people, including my family, want to talk about a lot with regard to the volume.
“I’m proud of the consistency. But as far as the total number, that’s not anything I will be thinking about when I take my last breath. I learned that from my dad [Jack Buck] and following his career and learning at a young age that this business is not always fair.
“I was in the right spot at the right time and very lucky that Fox kept getting the rights for not only baseball, but obviously football. But it’s not always a reflection of excellence. I think sometimes, it is just being in the right circumstance, which I was at a great place for 20-plus years.”
Sunday, he’ll be in Cabo. That doesn’t seem half bad.
Quick Clicks
It wasn’t a coincidence that Tom Brady made his pronouncement on Colin Cowherd’s show about taking a gap year before he is scheduled to become Fox Sports’ No. 1 NFL game analyst. Fox’s Super Bowl media day was scheduled for Tuesday. The goal was to make it less of a distraction for Burkhardt, Olsen and the entire team doing the Super Bowl.
Yankees fans did not like Carlos Beltran in the YES booth and their assessments weren’t wrong, but it’s a shame that it did not work out with Beltran and Cameron Maybin.
YES tried to do something different. Viewers may not care — and maybe they shouldn’t — but Beltran was doing the games in a second language, which is an accomplishment in itself. YES did not want Maybin back, and now he has picked up 30 Tigers games. Maybin, who also works for MLB Network and the Cubs’ Marquee Network, would have been better off starting in Detroit and then coming to YES.
Regardless, if you want to try something different, it takes time, which is an important lesson in a social media world.
Clicker Books
With Olsen in the booth and Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl, it seems appropriate to have a review of a book all about tight ends.
Tyler Dunne’s “The Blood and Guts: How Tight Ends Save Football” describes the growth of the position from Mike Ditka to George Kittle. The position is increasingly important to offenses, which Dunne shows, and the result is 4.25 out of 5 clickers for his tome.