Category Archives: Fox Sports

Glazer: ‘You don’t think Peter King has relationships with people in this league?’; Details of Incognito interview

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Richard Deitsch at MMQB gets the backstory from Jay Glazer on his interview with Richie Incognito Sunday. He also gets into the perceptions that he’s best buddies with many players, including Incognito.

On persuading Incognito to do the interview:

What I said to him was the court of public opinion closes on Monday. You want to testify or not? I’d want to. But come Monday, Richie, nobody is going to care what you have to say. It will be too late. This is what I would do. And I relayed a story that Ronde Barber told me. He said, I wish my brother [Tiki] had spoken up when he was getting crushed. I wish he defended himself in public. Because he didn’t, it was hard for me and the rest of my family to defend him as much as we wanted. I relayed that story to [Richie]. Whether you believe Richie or not, I want to hear from Richie Incognito. I want to hear from Jonathan Martin.

On not asking him about the incident in which he allegedly harassed a woman at a golf tournament.

No, it is a line of questioning worthy of pursuit. You have that wrong. I just was not doing it for this particular piece. I think it is a separate story. I pushed him on it, and he said, “Gag order. Can’t talk. Gag order.” I said, “Well, obviously, something happened,” and he kind of shrugged.

On his relationships with players:

My job is to get scoops and exclusives, and I think I have done it as well as anybody. So it [relationships] has obviously not gotten in the way. I have come out with negative stories. I have come out with positive stories. I have come out with stuff where my own guys get really angry at me. The funny thing is, I am working with Brian Urlacher now (on FOX Sports 1). He got really pissed off with me with three years left in his career because I reported something about a back injury he had that he did not want out there. He never told me another piece of information ever again. People don’t know about that. I had to tell people he was not playing and was not himself. He didn’t say Don’t go with it. He just said I am not talking about it. But I had it. He was one of my closest friends in the league and his last three or four years I never got a piece of information from him. He was pissed about it.

It does not get in the way of what I do. People are like, Oh, my God, Jay has a relationship with Richie. I have a relationship with, like, 900 people in this league. That is my job. Adam Schefter, Peter King—you don’t think Peter King has relationships with people in this league? We all have relationships. That is what we do. We are in the relationship business. But nobody talks about that, and I have talked about it. People keep bringing it up with me when nobody brings it up with everybody else who has written books [with subjects].

However, Schefter and King don’t actively train with players.

(Deitsch): So let’s be specific here. You would say that training NFL players in MMA is not on face an economic partnership?

No, because I didn’t get paid. How is it an economic partnership? There are no economics involved. There is no money. How is it an economic partnership? He [Incognito] pays his trainer, this guy Tyron Woodley. I do not make a dime and never have. He does not pay me anything. Some guys get charged. Some guys don’t. The money goes to the fighters and the equipment. None of it goes to me. … These guys come out to train, and I have a great training program. I make either the players pay the fighters directly or if they pay MMA Athletics, I pay the fighters directly or I will use it for travel for the fighters or the equipment. But no, I have never, ever, ever made a dime off this. I have probably lost money. I do it because I love it. I don’t do it to make money. I do it because I try to promote this sport. … I have always been involved with it. I love mixed martial arts. I love it. It is my passion. It is what I love to do. Some people like to play chess or checkers to blow off steam. I like to fight. I like martial arts.

No denying Glazer’s ties to Incognito; Does it matter in today’s media age?; Critiques of interview

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In the interest of journalism, it would have been great to see someone like Scott Pelley, Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer conduct the Richie Incognito interview Sunday. However, there was zero chance that the disgraced Miami offensive lineman would ever sit down with one of them.

Instead, Incognito did the big chat with his pal, Jay Glazer. At the top, Glazer revealed he had done MMA training with Incognito, as he does with a number of NFL players.

A conflict of interest? To be sure.

But does it matter in today’s media age? Probably not.

The bottom line: Glazer got the interview everyone wanted. Fox NFL Sunday likely did a big rating because of the interview. Throughout Sunday and now today, the interview remains a prime topic of discussion, especially on the competition, ESPN.

In another person’s hands, the interview probably would have been handled differently. Glazer is one of these Buddy-Buddy guys. To expect him to become Mike Wallace on Incognito wouldn’t be realistic.

Glazer wasn’t capable of truly pressing Incognito. He gave him an out with this question: “There’s so many subplots in this. How much has come out, where you looked at it and said … ‘That’s not even close’?”

Translated, you’re not really that bad of a guy, are you?

Dave Zirin of The Nation pounded on Glazer:

To say that this interview was a cheap exercise in public relations would be to insult the people who do very good work in the world of public relations. The interview was edited with the subtlety of a Breitbart video and Jay Glazer threw more softballs than the cumulative careers of Lisa Fernandez and Jennie Finch.

I viewed the interview through the prism of knowing Glazer had a relationship with Incognito that went beyond journalist-player. Yet how many viewers, who don’t have a journalist’s eye, watched it the same way?

They wanted to hear from Incognito, and Glazer delivered him on Sunday morning with your bagels and coffee. In the eyes of Fox, so what if it is less than ideal?

Glazer and Fox NFL Sunday landed the big interview. That’s what matters in today’s media age.

Your turn, Jonathan Martin. However, Glazer won’t be getting that interview.

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Here are more critiques to the interview.

Tom Ley, Deadspin: The interview was a fucking joke.The segment was more theater than journalism, with Glazer lobbing obviously pre-determined questions at Incognito, allowing him to reel off as many face-saving platitudes as possible.

Richard Deitsch, SI.com: Prior to the interview, Glazer said he “held nothing back” and asked Incognito “everything.” Did he fulfill that charter? I’d say not entirely given this viewer wanted to hear Incognito address the allegations that he harassed a women on a golf course in 2012 during a team charity golf tournament, how often Incognito had been called into the NFL offices over the last couple of years, as well as an on-camera denial from Incognito refusing to answer questions about the role of Dolphins general manager Jeff Ireland and coach Joe Philbin.

Jarrett Bell, USA Today: Incognito, the suspended Miami Dolphins guard and face of the alleged workplace harassment that prompted second-year tackle Jonathan Martin to bolt from the team and seek counseling, was rather pathetic as he tried to explain himself amid the “friendly fire” interview with Glazer, his pal who trains him in MMA tactics.

Tom Jones, Tampa Bay Times: For the most part, Glazer handled the interview well. He asked Incognito about using the n-word on Martin’s voice mail. He questioned whether Incognito is a racist and a bully and a bad guy. He asked about the details in his dealings with Martin. And he even questioned Incognito’s “checkered past,” which included problems in college and a recent allegation of inappropriate contact with a woman at a charity golf tournament.

I would have liked to have seen Glazer press Incognito on the details of that golf incident, but it’s my guess that Incognito’s representatives made that off-limits. If so, Glazer should have said that. And if there were no off-limit topics, Glazer should have reported that, too. Still, overall, Glazer did a respectable job.

Glazer on Incognito interview: ‘The golf thing had nothing to do with any of that and happened over a year ago’

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Bob Raissman of the New York Daily News talked to Jay Glazer about his interview with Richie Incognito.

Raissman brings up a main criticism of the interview:

Still, the fact Glazer never asked Incognitio about the Dolphins golf outing incident, where he was accused of molesting a young female volunteer with a golf club, was a glaring, miserable omission. It definitely was a punch pulled. Glazer contended he raised the question but it was left on the cutting room floor. The interview lasted 45 minutes. Fox aired six.

“I wanted the interview to highlight racism, bullying, and the relationship between Richie and Jonathan,” Glazer said. “The golf thing had nothing to do with any of that and happened over a year ago.”

But watching Incognito having to deal with the golf question would have further opened a window into his soul. Now, his eyes are wide open. “He’s been beat down by all this….This thing has brought him to a whole other level with paparazzi and TV vans following him,” Glazer said. “I tried kidding with him that he’s become the Lindsay Lohan of sports. I don’t think he was amused.”

Glazer discussed his approach:

Glazer never got confrontational with Incognito. He didn’t muddy the waters by picking a fight. Many of his questions were pointed, like when he asked: “How do you tell America, how do you expect anybody in America to believe you’re not racist?”

“Look, I believe this story has gotten way out ahead of itself. People have jumped to conclusions. I’ve talked to everyone involved,” Glazer said during our conversation. “That’s why I have let everyone else do the talking. It’s not about what I think. I wanted the viewer at home to hear Richie and make up their own mind. What would the viewer want to know? That’s how I framed the questions.”

Incognito talks more; Glazer’s analysis; transcript of what he said

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The winner of the Richie Incognito mess: Hooter’s. It has a big (open to many interpretations) ad on the FoxSports.com site this morning, which will be getting plenty of traffic this morning.

Here’s what I have on my site, sans Hooter’s: Richie Incongito’s extended interview with Jay Glazer; Glazer discussing the interview on Fox Sports 1; A transcript of highlights from the interview is below.

My analysis to come.

Incognito: You can ask anybody in the Miami Dolphins locker room who had Jon Martin’s back the absolute most. And they will undoubtedly tell you, me.

Incognito: Jon never showed signs that football was getting to him, um, the locker room was getting to him.

Glazer: You’re saying you don’t know what led to this. Your teammates are saying, ‘We don’t know.’ His side has clearly said, ‘We do know.’ OK, and there’s bullying involved. There was a voice message left. I’m going to read it to you. You did leave this voice message?

Incognito: Yes, I did leave this voice message.

Glazer: And it’s, ‘Hey, what’s up, you half N-word piece of blank. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. Want to blank in your blank mouth. I’m going to slap your blank mouth. Going to slap your real mother across the face. (Laughter) You’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.’ You hear that, going back to that now, do you look at that and say, ‘I left that for Jonathan Martin?’

Incognito: When I see that voicemail, when I see those words come up across the screen, I’m embarrassed by it. I’m embarrassed by my actions. But what I want people to know is, the way Jonathan and the rest of the offensive line and how our teammates, how we communicate, it’s vulgar. It’s, it’s not right. When the words are put in the context, I understand why a lot of eyebrows get raised, but people don’t know how Jon and I communicate to one another.

Glazer: But there’s one thing of saying that, another thing with a white man using the N-word. How do you tell America, how do you expect anybody in America to believe you’re not a racist?

Incognito: I’m not a racist. And to judge me by that one word is wrong. In no way, shape or form is it ever acceptable for me to use that word, even if it’s friend to friend on a voicemail. I regret that.

Glazer: How much in today’s locker room is it thrown around by African Americans and white players?

Incognito: It’s thrown around a lot. It’s a word that I’ve heard Jon use a lot. Not saying it’s right for when I did it in the voicemail, but there’s a lot of colorful words thrown around the locker room that we don’t use in everyday life. The fact of the matter remains, though, that that voicemail was left on a private voicemail for my friend, and it was a joke.

Glazer: Right, wrong, or indifferent, because of all this, you’ve become the face of bullying in America. Someone thinks of a bully, they think of Richie Incognito.

Incognito: This isn’t an issue about bullying. This is an issue of mine and Jon’s relationship where I’ve taken stuff too far and I didn’t know it was hurting him.

Glazer: Did Jonathan Martin overreact? Or was Jonathan hurting that much?

Incognito: I can’t sit here and tell you who overreacted, who did what. I can just sit here and be accountable for my actions. And my actions were coming from a place of love. No matter how bad and how vulgar it sounds, that’s how we communicate, that’s how our friendship was, and those are the facts, and that’s what I’m accountable for.

Glazer: You’re telling me there wasn’t any signs going into that?

Incognito: As the leader, as his best friend on the team, that’s what has me miffed — how I missed this. I never saw it. I never saw it coming.

Glazer: There’s so many subplots in this. How much has come out, where you looked at it and said … ‘That’s not even close’?

Incognito: I think the whole thing, I’ve been sitting here saying, ‘That’s not even close.’ It sounds terrible. It sounds, when it’s on the screen, it sounds like I’m a racist pig, it sounds like I’m a meathead. It sounds a lot of things that it’s not. And I want to clear the air just by saying I’m a good person.

Glazer: You obviously have had a very checkered history. From way back in college all the way up to recently with last year with the incident at the golf course. You’re sitting up here and saying, ‘Hey, I’m a good guy.’ It’s difficult for us, as America, to grasp that when all they see are the episodes.

Incognito: Right, no question. And if you go by just all the knucklehead stuff I’ve pulled in the past, done in my past, you’re sitting in your home and you’re thinking, ‘This guy is a loose cannon, this guy is a terrible person, this guy is a racist.’ When that couldn’t be farther from the truth. If I was a racist and I was bullying Jon Martin, when the press went in there and asked them questions, that locker room would have said, ‘Listen, we saw this, we saw that.’ I’m proud of my guys for having my back and telling the truth. But the fact of the matter is when Jon left the team on Monday, we played a game on Thursday. I spoke with Jon on Friday.

Glazer: You spoke with him?

Incognito: I texted with him, I text messaged, I spoke with him through text message. And he texted me and said, ‘I don’t blame you guys. I blame some stuff in the locker room. I blame the culture. I blame what was going on around me.’ And when all this stuff got going and swirling, bullying got attached to it and my name got attached to it. I just texted him as a friend and was like, ‘What’s up with this, man?’ He said, ‘It’s not coming from me. I haven’t said anything to anybody.’ And I’m like, ‘OK.’

Glazer: Would these be texts you would be willing to share?

Incognito: No question. I’ll give you, after this interview, I’ll give you my phone. And we’ll walk through all these texts, and I will show you the framework of a friendship.

Glazer: If Jonathan Martin was sitting right here next to you, what would you say to him?

Incognito: I think, honestly, I think I’d give him a big hug right now because we’ve been through so much and I’d just be like, ‘Dude, what’s going on? Why didn’t you come to me?’ If he were to say, ‘Listen, you took it way too far. You hurt me.’ … You know, I would just apologize and explain to him exactly what I explained to you, and I’d apologize to his family. They took it as malicious. I never meant it that way.

Mariotti to fill in for Jay Mohr on Fox Sports Radio today and Friday

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The Jay Mariotti comeback tour moves to Fox Sports Radio.

Mariotti will sit in for Jay Mohr on his noon-3 p.m. ET show today and Friday. In an email, he said he was contacted by Clear Channel about handling the fill-in duties.

“I like the brand and what they’re doing with it,” Mariotti said.

After being mostly on the sidelines since 2010 following a highly publicized legal incident, Mariotti jumped back in this summer with his own site, Mariottishow.com. The site features a daily web-based radio show, videos and Mariotti columns on everything and anything.

Fox Sports Radio gives the polarizing Mariotti, a former panelist on ESPN’s Around the Horn, his biggest platform in recent years. Will it be a one-time test drive, or will it lead more of Mariotti on Fox Sports Radio?

As they say, stay tuned.

 

Super Thursday: With Oregon-Stanford, Baylor-Oklahoma, who needs Washington-Vikings?

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As Thursday nights go, this is a most excellent pre-Thanksgiving feast. Maybe the best ever for college football.

ESPN has No. 3 Oregon traveling to No. 5 Stanford tonight. Meanwhile, Fox Sports 1 will show No. 6 Baylor hosting No. 10 Oklahoma.

Two games with four top 10 teams and plenty of BCS implications on a Thursday night. I mean, who needs Washington at Minnesota on NFL Network? That’s Mediocre vs. Terrible.

How did this bounty happen? According to ESPN, Stanford was slated to host a Thursday night game this year, and the network requested the one against Oregon. Voila, ESPN now gets one of the best match-ups of the year on any day.

Fox Sports 1 also has a strong game. The staggered starting times will allow college football fans to watch the end of both games: Baylor-Oklahoma starts at 7:30 ET and Oregon-Stanford is at 9 p.m. ET.

How unusual are these Thursday night powerhouse games? Bill Connelly of SB Nation writes that since 2009, there only have been two match-ups on Thursday nights featuring ranked teams: Sept. 15, 2011: No. 3 LSU 19, No. 25 Mississippi State 6; Nov. 10, 2011: No. 10 Virginia Tech 37, No. 21 Georgia Tech 26.

Connelly:

We rarely expect to see elite teams playing on Thursday nights. These games are usually reserved for programs that are happy to risk iffy weeknight attendance for a spot on national television. We’ve seen a lot of Georgia Tech on Thursday nights over the years, for instance. But the big teams and huge games are typically saved for Saturdays.

Alabama-LSU is slated for Saturday night on CBS. That should be more than enough to fill your plate. ABC is showing Notre Dame at Pittsburgh in primetime. When in doubt, always go with the Irish, right ABC?

However, for quality and quantity, it will be hard to top Thursday night. Both ESPN and Fox Sports 1 should do strong ratings. Whether they beat the NFL monster remains to be seen, but the pros will lose many viewers to the college games.

Enjoy the feast, college football fans.

 

Real story about 2013 World Series ratings: Think Mendoza Line for historical lows

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Please fellow colleagues,  stop writing that the World Series was a huge success for Fox and Major League Baseball.

The reports talked about how ratings were up 17 percent from 2012 for the Boston-St. Louis series. Fox called it, “A Grand Slam” in a press release, and others ran with it, as if to say all is well with the game.

Well, here is the real story.

Yes, the final rating of 8.9 was up 17 percent from the 7.6 in San Francisco’s sweep over Detroit in 2012. But that series was an all-time low.

The ratings had nowhere to go but up. Not to pick on my old White Sox pal Adam Dunn, but proclaiming a 17-percent ratings increase is much like boasting about him raising his average 45 points from 2011 to 2012. Of course, he went from a horrific .159 to a bit less horrific .204.

Indeed, the recent ratings suggests, like Dunn, baseball is treading along the Mendoza Line.

Baseball now has failed to break double-digit ratings in three of the last four World Series, and it barely got there with a 10 for St. Louis’ victory in seven games over Texas in 2011.

If you’re looking for a recent comparison, go to the Yankees’ six-game triumph over Philadelphia in 2009. That series did an 11.9 rating. The 2013 Series was down 26 percent compared to that number.

And don’t give me that it was the Yankees. The Red Sox also have a massive national appeal. Heck, when they swept Colorado in 2007, the series still did a 10.6 rating; it was a huge 15.8 for their curse-breaking victory over St. Louis in 2004.

Now that 15.8, if not 10.6, seems like a pipe dream. Consider that a compelling six-gamer in 2013 featuring two of baseball’s most storied franchises failed to even pull a 9 rating. It was the fourth-lowest rating of all time.

Privately, I bet Fox and MLB executives had to be disappointed that this series didn’t do at least a 10 rating. Back in the mid-2000s, the number probably would have been closer to 15.

As I wrote earlier in the week, the erosion in the World Series ratings is a recent trend that really began in the mid-2000s. Viewers began to tune out the Fall Classic, and many of them haven’t come back.

How bad has it gotten? Take a look at this passage from Sports Media Watch:

For the fifth time in six years, the World Series was outdrawn by the NBA Finals. The Heat/Spurs series averaged a 9.7 rating and 16.2 million viewers through six games, and a 10.5 and 17.7 million for the full seven. The NBA Finals also averaged a 7.1 rating among adults 18-49.

Keep in mind, the NBA Finals are in June, when fewer people are watching TV. Long gone are the days when the NBA Finals barely registered compared to the World Series. Now it is somewhat of a benchmark.

Indeed, the bar has been lowered significantly when people are celebrating an 8.9 rating for a compelling World Series. That’s the real story here, colleagues.

 

 

 

 

Revenge of fan shot: Fox botches game-ending pick-off

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For years, Fox Sports has been criticized for its quick-cut players/fan reaction shots between pitches.Sunday night, the technique came back to bite the network.

As a result, a St. Louis woman holding a rebird hat (puppet?) will forever be a part of one of the most unusual endings ever to a World Series game.

Fox lingered a bit too long on the woman. All of the sudden, Joe Buck yelled out and there was a quick shot of Mike Napoli applying the tag to Kolten Wong from a terrible camera angle. Viewers never saw Koji Uehara turn and make the throw for the dramatic pick-off.

It wasn’t until the replays were shown that we had any perspective of what happened.

The reality is that all the networks show player/manager/fan reaction shots between pitches. So what happened to Fox Sports last could have happened to any of them.

However, the fact that Fox insists on doing so many of them, to the distraction of many viewers including this one, warrants a more intense finger-pointing after what happened last night.

If a similar situation occurs in Game 5, the Fox cameras should just stay with the pitcher. You never know when he will turn and throw to first to end the game.

 

 

Assessing Tim McCarver’s legacy: Record-setting longevity, candor, and critics

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My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana examines the legacy of Tim McCarver. This year’s World Series marks the end of an unprecedented run in sports broadcast history.

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Fox Sports held a teleconference for its World Series coverage earlier this week. Naturally, one of the first questions was directed at Tim McCarver, who will be calling his last series for the network.

“I don’t mind answering a couple (personal) questions, but the emphasis should be on the Series and the players involved,” McCarver said.

McCarver then went on to praise Fox Sports executives and began to get sentimental about his long-time partner Joe Buck.

When it came time for his turn, Buck, trying to lighten the mood with perfect timing, said, “I can’t wait for this to be over.”

Everyone laughed, and Buck paid tribute to McCarver. Then after a couple more baseball questions about the Red Sox and Cardinals, McCarver was asked again to reflect on his career.

McCarver answered and then made another plea: “I would prefer this be the last question about my final World Series, please. I respectfully request that.”

Indeed, if this whole thing feels awkward, it’s probably because it is. It gets to the core of a somewhat complicated broadcast legacy for McCarver.

I’m not so sure McCarver, 72, wants to walk away from his duties at Fox. He continues to emphasize that he isn’t retiring from the booth.

Last week, he told Chad Finn of the Boston Globe, “I’m not retiring. I’m cutting back on what I’ll be doing. I won’t be doing the World Series, playoffs, All-Star Game, but I’ll be doing something, stuff that will feed my passions. Plural.”

So why not just stay at Fox? The network could have reduced his regular-season workload, allowing him to be its signature analyst during the postseason.

It didn’t work out that way.

With McCarver’s contract set to expire this year, perhaps he had enough of hearing from critics who haven’t always been kind in recent years. There’s also the sense that Fox wants to bring in new blood in the analyst’s chair to freshen up its baseball broadcasts.

At some point, it’s just time to move on.

So whenever the final out is made next week, McCarver likely will be wrapping up the portion of his career that is unmatched in baseball broadcast history. This marks his 24th World Series as an analyst, a record. Remarkably, he did it for three different networks, beginning with ABC in 1985, when he teamed with Al Michaels and Jim Palmer for the St. Louis-Kansas City series. He followed the national TV baseball package to CBS and then Fox.

You don’t become the lead analyst for a generation without having some considerable talent. Once moving to the broadcast booth, McCarver quickly became known for an uncanny knack of anticipating what would happen in a game. Buck says there’s nobody better.

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Here’s the link for the rest of the column.