Jim Nantz is in the midst of a very busy time. He’s calling the Thursday Night Football package for CBS and NFL Network including tonight’s Cleveland at Cincinnati game on NFLN. In addition, he calls selected Sunday afternoon games, mostly in the 4:25 p.m. ET window and he’s slated to be in the broadcast booth at Levi’s Stadium come February for Super Bowl 50 on CBS. Overall, he’s going to call 30 NFL games when all is said and done which would be a record for a network TV announcer.
Awful Announcing had the opportunity to speak with Nantz as he was heading to the airport for a five games in fifteen days stretch which includes tonight’s game as well as this Sunday’s Denver-Indy contest and ends on November 19 with Tennessee at Jacksonville. In this interview, we speak with Nantz about his preparation for this stretch and also get his review of the new James Bond move, Spectre which is being released in the United States this week.
AA: What have been the biggest storylines you have noticed in the first half of the 2015-16 NFL season?
Jim Nantz: Well I think the biggest storyline overall is the fact that we have four teams still undefeated at this in the season. It’s never happened before. We have some powerhouse teams, three of them reside in the AFC, and you’re beginning to see a glimpse of what the postseason is going to look like. It’s exciting stuff.
AA: Last season, you called 29 games and with the Super Bowl this season, it’ll make an even 30. How do you manage to pace yourself with such a long grind?
JN: You take it honestly on a day-by-day basis because it’s overwhelming when you try to look at the sum of it all. Take this week for example, I’m in a car driving up from my home in California to the San Francisco Airport. Thankfully my wife and my little baby girl are making this trip with me so I’m not going to be away from them for two weeks, but it’s a lot to plan for.
Each game demands its own preparation. That’s significant. And every broadcaster who’s called football in a career, whether it’s legendary iconic names like Summerall and Whitaker and Enberg and Gowdy and Al Michaels, they’ve all had a week to prepare for a game and that sounds like kind of an easy schedule. It’s not. If you really prepare in the right way and all of those broadcasters that I mentioned and everyone else, they know what it takes to just get ready for a single broadcast, the face-to-face meetings, the reams of information that you read, you know, several hundred pages a day if you’re doing it right…. it’s a process.
Well, you take that process and cut the time in half and you factor in additional travel on top of it and it’s like being on a treadmill that you never get off and you’re on for about 4½ months. I’m not complaining about it, I don’t dislike it. I’m a guy where my whole life is about juggling a lot of different things at once .. the Alzheimer’s Research Center and my family named it, we devote a lot of time to it .. I have a very big and successful wine brand that is up and running in all 50 states and 5,000 restaurants nationally, that demands a lot of time, and so too does at the same time, allocating your time to compartmentalizing your minutes and hours for being ready for an NFL broadcast. I’ve been very good at being organized and being able to do three or four different things at once.
The one time it feels a little overwhelming to me is when it comes time to leave for a long road trip. You start thinking “Ok, let’s see, I’ve got five games on this trip, it’s five boards. Oh let me go pull out some of the boards of the teams that I got a chance to see because I might have some good information there that I didn’t get in that last broadcast that I can save for another day. Let me make sure that I have all of the research materials at home that I need to take with me. Let me make sure I pack five different on-air outfits. What are the climates that I’m going into? Oh, it’s going to be warm in Florida, but it’s going to be perhaps cold up in New York.”
And you’re schlepping a lot of luggage and not all of it is just wardrobe, it’s research, game materials, and once you get through that, you just go and enjoy the ride.
I’m heading into Ohio for the Cleveland-Cincinnati game. I’m excited about this game. What are the Bengals going to do on a short week? They’re one of the four unbeaten and I’m looking forward to this game.
AA: How important has it been to have some Sundays off during the season to re-energize and to get that preparation ready?
JN: You need it! You really have to have it. It’s an aggressive plan, make no mistake about it. I can remember in the past, you’d be asked to the Thanksgiving game and then another game that Thanksgiving Sunday as well, I’m going back 25 years in my career as well, people would say, “You’re going to do a game on Thursday and Sunday? Are they crazy? How are we going to assign those guys that?” We’ve seen it with the NBC Sunday Night crew, Week 1 having the opening game on Thursday night and the Sunday game, it used to be mind-blowing “how are these guys going to do all that?”
Well, we do it nine or ten times during a season and we get for whatever reason the way the schedule breaks, we get a lot of these back-to-back stretches where you have five games in fifteen days. We’re used to it now. We did it last year. You get these Sundays off when the doubleheader belongs to Fox and it’s a great feeling to have a weekend at home.
AA: I heard that on one of your weekends off, you had a chance to see the new James Bond movie, how was it?
JN: Well, on the weekend of the 24th and 25th, I went to London.
AA: You went to London?
JN: I went to London, but it wasn’t just to see the Bond movie, I’m perfectly capable of seeing it here when it comes out on November 6, but it wasn’t to go see it on a random screen in the UK, I went to the World Premiere and got to walk the red carpet.
When I received the invitation to go to London I thought there’s just no way the schedule is going to work out, but when I looked it up, I saw it fell on one of my weekends off, and moreover, I had a New England game on Thursday on the way back over so it was the perfect scenario.
It was an opportunity to take my daughter, Caroline who’s a senior at USC, and give her a reward trip for all of her great efforts in college, she’s been a Dean List student throughout and give her a daddy-and-daughter experience that we’ll never forget.
AA: So how was the movie?
JN: In my mind, it’s the best Bond movie that’s ever been made. There’s been 24 of them and I know the Bond history like I know the teams I prepare for. It ties so many loose ends to Bond films of the past including the history of the villains in the Bond series. There is really clever and fascinating ways that the whole Bond series kind of got tied together in this one film. You’re asking me how I like this film and knowing the whole Bond series, I rank this number one. I don’t think it’s possible you’ll be disappointed.
That’s a ringing endorsement for the new movie. We thank Jim Nantz for taking the time out of his busy schedule to talk with us. The second half of the Thursday Night Football schedule kicks off tonight with Cleveland at Cincinnati on NFL Network at 8:25 p.m. ET.
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