Credit: NFL on CBS
By Sam Neumann on

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J.J. Watt’s biggest broadcast to date drew plenty of critics, but Dan Patrick wasn’t one of them.

Appearing on The Dan Patrick Show this week, the NFL on CBS analyst was greeted with a compliment from the host, who said Watt had matched the noise and energy of the crowd during Sunday’s Cowboys-Ravens game in Brazil and managed to translate the feeling of being in the moment to viewers at home. Patrick told Watt it seemed about as close to playing as a broadcaster could get, and the former Houston Texans defensive end wholeheartedly agreed.

“I fully agree with you that this is as close as you can get to playing in terms of the adrenaline, the play-to-play, snap-to-snap, having to be on your toes and reacting in real time,” Watt said. “And the atmosphere was that the second half of that game, that stadium, the atmosphere was electric. And so we were just living in the moment.”

Watt pinpointed the sequence that sent the Maracanã crowd of more than 72,000 into a frenzy. Early in the fourth quarter, with Baltimore up 24-21 and facing first-and-goal at the 3, the Cowboys stopped Derrick Henry twice short of the end zone before rookie linebacker Jaishawn Barham knifed through the line on fourth-and-goal from the 1 and dropped the All-Pro back for a 3-yard loss. Dallas answered by marching down the field to take a 28-24 lead, and the game seesawed from there, with the Cowboys tying it late before the Ravens escaped with a 34-31 win on Tyler Loop’s “trio in Rio.”

“I really don’t think anybody in that whole stadium sat down for the rest of the game after that point,” Watt added. “And it was just a blast.”

The game was the biggest stage yet for Watt, who was elevated to CBS’s top booth alongside Jim Nantz just weeks before the season in the wake of Tony Romo’s OWI arrest. As Brendon Kleen noted in Monday’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter, Watt and Nantz managed just one practice broadcast together before the season began, despite a 30-year age gap and roughly four decades of difference in booth experience. Cowboys-Ravens in Brazil, airing in CBS’s late window with two of the league’s most popular teams and a back-and-forth finish, was the closest thing to a national showcase Watt has had since taking over.

The reception was decidedly mixed, and much of the conversation centered on the same quality Patrick praised. Watt’s volume became a running joke on social media, with viewers wondering why he seemed to be shouting his way through the fourth quarter, and his attempts at humor struck plenty of people as labored enough to make them pine for Romo. The broadcast had its defenders, too. Nantz, by several accounts, sounded more invigorated than he had in years alongside Romo, and even critics who found Watt’s delivery grating credited his energy while noting that Romo’s knack for seizing a game’s biggest moments is a skill Watt has yet to master.

Kleen arrived at a similar conclusion. In his view, Watt is well prepared, articulates the football side of the game clearly, and isn’t afraid to challenge officials or second-guess play calls. Where Kleen felt Watt fell short was situational awareness. As the lead swung back and forth between Dallas and Baltimore in the closing minutes, Kleen wrote, Watt grew louder without growing sharper, and some of his reactions came across as forced.

Where Watt could catch up to Romo and others is with improved situational awareness. The best game analysts in all sports have a keen sense of time and situation. They rise to the biggest moments naturally. As the lead flipped between Dallas and Baltimore late on Sunday, Watt got loud but lacked focus. The reactions occasionally felt forced.

Kleen still graded Watt’s early body of work favorably for someone so new to the lead analyst chair, but argued that recognizing and articulating a game’s turning points is what separates the elite from the merely good, and that by that standard, Watt came up somewhat short in his first true test.

Watt, for his part, described the afternoon to Patrick as the closest thing he’s found to the rush of playing. The rest of the season will determine how CBS feels about that approach, with the network widely expected to make a call on Romo’s future and in need of a lead analyst it trusts by the time it airs its next Super Bowl.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann