NBC’s Saturday Night Live has often taken on sports, and the NFL in particular. And that’s often included impersonations of various networks’ NFL pregame personalities and game announcers. The latest version of that saw their cold open Saturday send up CBS’ The NFL Today cast and game announcers Jim Nantz and Tony Romo ahead of the AFC Championship Game, with them mourning the imminent loss of football. (According to this, the Super Bowl doesn’t count because it’s “not real football” and is “for commercials, and Usher, and people who never watch football asking how many points a touchdown is worth. Today is the last real football day for just us guys.”)
There are some pretty good lines in there, from Andrew Disnukes as Tony Romo starting the football mourning with the rant at top to Mikey Day as Bill Cowher asking “What are men supposed to do on Sundays now? Just go to their friends’ houses for no reason?” James Austin Johnson as Jim Nantz tries to encourage the group with “Don’t forget we’ve still got the Pro Bowl coming up,” but Kenan Thompson as James Brown says “Jim, I have been covering football for 30 years, and I have never once watched the Pro Bowl!”
There’s a good meta exchange in there about NFL viewership and SNL itself, too. Day says “This isn’t just about us, America needs football. It’s the only thing everyone still watches!” And Thompson deadpans “Especially live. There’s no other live TV that’s even remotely watchable!”
Beyond that, the sketch has a lot of mourning for the upcoming final season of Blue Bloods (apt considering how much it gets promoted on CBS NFL coverage) and an exchange between Devon Walker as Nate Burleson and Michael Longfellow as Phil Simms about Yellowstone and Barbie. And it has Heidi Gardner as Tracy Wolfson interviewing Molly Kearney as Chiefs’ head coach Andy Reid, with “Coach, are you upset about the season ending?” “Why, because it’s the only time I get to hang out with Taylor Swift? And now that’s over? I’m sorry, I need to go.” Wolfson herself took note of that:
Andy Reid and I making an appearance on @nbcsnl
Love it!! 😂 #SNL #ChiefsKingdom pic.twitter.com/f68SUvsqYJ— Tracy Wolfson (@tracywolfson) January 28, 2024
The sketch then ends with Walker as Burleson discussing the NFL on CBS team’s bonds, saying “To quote Fast and Furious 3-7, it’s about family. And apart from my wife and three kids, you guys are the only family I’ve got.” They then go into a version of the Wiz Khalifa song See You Again (featuring Charlie Puth), prominently used at the end of Fast and Furious 7.
The reception to this online was mixed, with the @NBCSNL tweet of it in particular taking some criticism. (They perhaps didn’t do themselves any favors by clipping and sharing the ending part with the song rather than the funnier jokes in the early part.) But there were some solid lines in here. And the discussion about how football is “the only thing everyone still watches” feels apt after a year where the top 50 sports events were all NFL games and the league recorded its second-most-watched regular season ever, and the playoffs so far are setting records as well.
At any rate, this adds to a long tradition of SNL parodying various NFL broadcasts and moments, from the ManningCast to Jon Gruden’s emails to “Sportsmax” disputing an 0-12 mark for the Jets. And it’s always interesting to see them take on the large cast of a NFL broadcast.
Funnily enough, most of the figures involved in the NFL Today parody here were parodying Fox NFL Sunday personalities in October, with Thompson as Curt Menefee, Day as Howie Long, Johnson as Jimmy Johnson, Walker as Michael Strahan, and Kearney as Terry Bradshaw. But given cast changeover, only Thompson and Day remain from a memorable NFL Today pre-Super Bowl spoof in 2021, and Day played Simms rather than Cowher then. It is amusing to see so many of these figures impersonate both CBS and Fox NFL figures in the same SNL season, though. And given how football is what everyone still watches, this may not be the last football moment in this SNL season.
[Saturday Night Live on YouTube]
