PHOENIX — For the NFC Championship game on Fox, Joe Buck was in a Paris bar, watching the Eagles and 49ers on his phone. For Super Bowl 2023, he will be in Cabo 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 Sports’ Super Bowl game-callers after Buck and Aikman left for ESPN’s “Monday Night Football.”
Buck had one year left on his Fox deal, but, after trying to keep him with a $12 million-per-year offer, Fox allowed Buck to leave, despite it being a Super Bowl season for the network.
If Buck 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 seven Super Bowls, which means he will still have a chance to match the legendary Michaels’ and Summerall’s mark. He will call the Super Bowl in February of 2027 for 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, as this is not similar to what the players on the field accomplish. 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 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.”
Now, he’ll be in Cabo Sunday. Doesn’t seem half bad.
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.
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. It is increasingly important to offenses, which Dunne shows and the result is 4.25 out of 5 clickers for his tome.
