Joe Buck and Troy Aikman aren’t closely associated with their time on Thursday Night Football, but those few seasons made them a better broadcast tandem.
Buck was a guest on the latest episode of the Rise and Schein podcast. During the interview, Adam Schein said he thought Buck’s rapport with Aikman reached new heights when they started calling Thursday Night Football in addition to their Sunday responsibilities for Fox. Buck, who now calls Monday Night Football games on ESPN alongside Aikman, agreed that juggling a busier broadcast schedule made the duo better.
“We started getting ready on our own as opposed to relying on each other in a group setting,” Buck said, explaining that with two broadcasts, there wasn’t enough time in the week to participate in all of the pregame meetings they normally would. “You should be able to go into a booth – and I would tell any broadcast student this – my board that I make is jammed with information. Ridiculously so. But if a big gust of wind came up and blew that out of the booth, I should be able to do the game just fine and you at home should not be able to tell that I don’t have all that junk sitting in front of me.”
Buck and Aikman pulled double duty for Fox and called a slate of Thursday Night Football games from 2018-2021.
“When you do Thursday, Sunday and you start doing everything on telephone conference calls and you kind of run and gun a little bit,” Buck continued. “I think you rely more on your own personality and your own take and you can have more fresh interactions about the game with each other instead of having worn it out for two-and-a-half days prior to the game kicking off.”
Spending 22 years together and surpassing the John Madden-Pat Summerall pairing as the longest tenured announcing duo in NFL history doesn’t happen without natural chemistry. But football audiences would undoubtedly agree, Buck and Aikman have sounded different in recent years. There’s more fun, more rapport, more of a willingness to give raw analysis, takes and opinions.
“It made us a little more fresh and it made us a little more reliant on our own eyes and our own personality,” Buck told Schein. “I think we found, we don’t need a lot of that other stuff, we’re just watching a football game. So, to squeeze the life out of it before you get there is, I think, a mistake. I work my a** off and I prepare really hard, but I know what I need to do to get ready for the game and we don’t have to be in a little Cub Scout troop getting ready for the game because that’s the way it’s always been done. And I think that change, because of the schedule, did make us better.”
