NFL games see plenty of injuries, and even a notable amount of serious injuries. And any injury poses challenges for a broadcast team. But the one to Houston Texans’ wide receiver Tank Dell in Saturday’s game against the Kansas City Chiefs was particularly rough on a few fronts. One, it came as he caught a touchdown pass, forcing play-by-play voice Noah Eagle to quickly go from excitement over the touchdown to concern for Dell:
Tank Dell suffers what appears to be a serious knee injury while making an incredible TD catch on a deep pass from C.J. Stroud. pic.twitter.com/twnlBY6DN6
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 21, 2024
“Caught! In the bucket for Dell! And a touchdown! And Dell is down after the play. He knew it immediately after he made the grab. A 30-yard strike, and an extra point away from the tie, but the concern now is for Dell.”
That’s actually a relatively smooth transition between two dramatically different broadcast tones, all things considered. And Eagle deserves credit for quickly recognizing the injury here; there have certainly been cases in the past where announcers went on longer praising the play before realizing the player on the ground wasn’t getting up.
NBC’s decision to show the replay can be debated. It doesn’t show anything exceptionally graphic, but it does certainly show the moment where Dell’s teammate’s helmet hit his leg and the way his leg bent in response, and some don’t appreciate when broadcasters do that. But where and how the injury transpired wasn’t incredibly clear in real time, so there is some value to the replay showing how this happened. (And Eagle noted later in the broadcast “There are angles we won’t show you just due to the severity of this injury,” so NBC did censor themselves a bit.”)
It’s worth noting that Eagle’s analyst partner Todd Blackledge took some social media criticism for his comments near the end of this clip relating this to the knee injury Chiefs’ receiver Rashee Rice suffered in Week 4. The critics complained about that given that Dell and Rice are on different teams. But that made sense from this perspective considering that that injury was also from a collision with a teammate.
Beyond those initial challenges for the broadcast, there were further ones when they came back from break. NBC came back to shots of Dell being put on an enclosed injury cart and his teammates having an emotional huddle, including Jared Wayne, the receiver who crashed into Dell here, and QB C.J. Stroud, who had tears welling up in his eyes and was being consoled by teammates:
Tank Dell was stretchered off with a “severe knee injury” after a lengthy delay in Kansas City. C.J. Stroud was very distraught.
Noah Eagle and Todd Blackledge have the Texans-Chiefs call for NBC. https://t.co/A6gsaqLuyg pic.twitter.com/dyUF1flF6e
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 21, 2024
And Eagle had to talk through that, and then Blackledge chimed in with thoughts on the reactions to this: “That’s the reality of it. They’re tough men that play this game and coach this game, but there’s a lot of emotion as well.” Eagle then talked through more of this, including how players have to try and reset and “focus on the game at hand,” as the cart finally left the field.
It should be noted that NBC also got strong injury reporting here from Kathryn Tappen. That started with a report not long after this that Dell was indeed out for the game and was headed to hospital for evaluation, which wasn’t surprising, but was worth having to confirm and close the loop. And Tappen then provided more details later on, including about the “vacuum seal cast” that was used to stabilize Dell’s leg.
From the two clips above, NBC had to spend almost four minutes of on-air time specifically discussing a severe injury, and had to do most of that before the player was actually removed from the field. And that was with an intervening commercial break as well, and with further complications such as having to show and discuss teammates’ notable reactions. That’s an incredibly challenging situation for any network and booth, and it’s maybe tougher still when you consider that this is only the second NFL game the pair of Eagle and Blackledge worked this year. (They called the Week 1 Peacock game in Brazil, but NBC usually only has one game a week for Sunday Night Football, and that’s typically called by Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth.)
Still, Eagle and Blackledge handled this well. And their chemistry together from two years working on NBC’s primetime Big Ten game on Saturday nights (where they placed third in our CFB announcer rankings this season) likely helped. College football is notably different in many respects, but does come with some of the same challenges around addressing injuries.
It seemed from this perspective like both Eagle and Blackledge and the whole production team here (including the selection of replays and reaction shots) did about as well as they could with these circumstances. But almost four minutes of on-air injury coverage is still not something that’s easy for anyone to handle. And that makes it perhaps more remarkable still that a rare NFL booth was able to do such a strong job with this.
[Awful Announcing on X]