Joe Buck: Dead air on broadcasts doesn’t exist anymore

Don’t be afraid not to talk.

That’s Joe Buck’s mantra for every broadcasting student he meets.

When Dan Patrick recently pondered when live broadcasts became a nonstop torrent of chatter, the voice of ESPN’s Monday Night Football wished it could flip back the other way.

“I think that little voice in your head is telling you if I don’t say something here, the audience thinks I don’t know what to say,” Buck explained. “And it’s that insecurity. I think insecurity breeds overtalking. I could make the case with the advancements that have been made in audio; there really is no more dead air. Dead air doesn’t exist anymore. If I don’t talk, you’re going to hear Aaron Rodgers calling signals out at the line of scrimmage. Or just good natural sound. Or just the sound of a crowd enjoying a game. And that’s really the beauty of baseball.

“Kind of that hum that happens underneath. And I always tried to do the game like that. I tried to pick my spots. I realize I’m not doing radio. I don’t need to go, ‘Hey, here’s the 2-1 pitch. Uh, so and so rears back, lets it fly. Swing and a groundball to short, Jeter goes in the hole. Backhanded stop. Long throw. Bounces it to first. Dug out by the first baseman. Two out. I can just go, ‘Jeter to his right. Two out.’ That’s how I always tried to do a game because that’s how I’d want to listen to it.

No one in the industry has ever mastered the art of getting out of the way of a big moment quite like Buck. When Mark McGwire hit that historic home run to break Roger Maris’ record, Buck’s call was a perfect example of restraint, letting history speak for itself without drowning it in words.

Buck revisited this concept earlier this year in a conversation with The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand. He hammered home the idea that dead air isn’t something to fear anymore. His real mission is to challenge young broadcasters to trust themselves enough not to fill every silence.

That said, Buck is very much a man of his era. While he still has plenty to offer, he recognizes that this is 2025, a time when audiences don’t necessarily crave cadence or conciseness. Instead, they want every moment filled, constantly digitally stimulated. The pressure to fill the airwaves leaves little room for silence or subtlety.

“And that doesn’t make it right, wrong, or indifferent,” he said. “But when Pat Summerall and John Madden left, and now all of a sudden, it’s me, Troy [Aikman] and Cris Collinsworth, I took the bait of trying to be Pat Summerall. And I go back and I listen to myself in the early 2000s and I’m like, ‘Yuck, man, I hate that,’ because I’m doing the ‘Montana. Rice. Touchdown.’ And then Madden, it was beautiful because Madden was bouncing off the walls, and Pat was the straight man, and just hit the notes, and just let you enjoy it for what it was.

“But, I took that bait. I never really tried to be my dad. I did take a lot of cues from him, and a lot of the pacing was the same, but I fell in the trap of trying to be Pat. And I realized looking back at it, that there’s only one Pat.”

And there’s only one Joe Buck.

And he’d tell you that dead air isn’t silence to fear; it’s space for the moment to speak.