Hard to believe we are already done with Week 3 of the NFL season, but here we are. By this time next week, the first quarter of the strangest, most uncertain season any of us have ever experienced will be in the books.
Sports radio in plenty of markets, whether they have a team or not, is dominated by NFL talk. I thought it might be interesting though to talk about how the NFL was discussed during the spring and summer in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The perennially underachieving Bengals had the first pick of the 2020 Draft and used it to take Joe Burrow, a can’t-miss quarterback prospect that happened to be a native Ohioan. There would be so much hype around him and this team locally, no-matter the situation. Throw in a pandemic and the challenges that come with it though, and now you’re talking about a preseason that is more about what we weren’t seeing than what we were.
To get a first-hand perspective of this, we turned to our friend Mo Egger, the host of the afternoon drive show on ESPN 1530 in Cincinnati.
In this guest column, Mo writes that the pandemic forced him to problem solve and get creative. He had to talk about a player that, for the most part, he didn’t get to see. He had to tap into the energy of his audience, some of whom let Burrow redefine the team for them without knowing what to say.
It turns out that mystery ended up being an ally in creating great radio. Enjoy!
The unknown is a blank canvas.
That statement reads like something really profound that came from some sort of really wise philosopher or literary figure, or maybe whoever it is that’s in charge of those motivational Successories posters that seemingly every radio sales manager used to have in their offices, right?
Actually, I came up with it, and until I was asked to write this free guest column, it’s not something I’d ever thought I’d be sharing with anyone or elaborating on, but here we are.
When it became abundantly clear that the Cincinnati Bengals were going to own the first pick of the 2020 NFL Draft and that LSU quarterback Joe Burrow was the obvious choice for a franchise in desperate need of both a fresh start on the field and a figure for fans to rally around, I was more than ready to embrace months’ worth of unknowns for both me and my audience.
Talking about the Bengals in recent seasons hasn’t been fun. With the ashes from their most recent playoff collapse in January 2016 still smoldering, the last part of the decade were filled with boring, often non-competitive teams that played its games against the backdrop of growing fan discontent and the results seeming almost pointless to bigger-picture questions about who would be its next coach and quarterback.
Zac Taylor replaced Marvin Lewis, who left after 16 seasons, in February 2019, but with the same crummy roster in place for year one of his regime, a long, losing season was inevitable long before it began. Before most people around the country even knew who Joe Burrow was, it was obvious early in Taylor’s first year that he would be coaching a different quarterback in year two.
While it’s hard to argue that the Bengals’ franchise itself didn’t deserve a player like Burrow landing on its doorstep, its fans sure did. So did those of us who’ve spent a lot of airtime trying to say different things about the same old football team.
In the initial months of the offseason, the amount and variety of Burrow/Bengals storylines were a host’s dream, from national figures wondering whether or not Burrow would refuse to come to Cincinnati a la Eli Manning, to the debate about whether a team bereft of talent would be wise to trade the top pick in exchange for more draft capital. There were skeptics of Burrow’s lack of arm strength, and suggestions that his transcendent senior season was merely a product of the offense he was playing in. The fact that Burrow hails from Ohio, originally attended Ohio State, and briefly flirted with playing at the University of Cincinnati added unique layers to the story, as did the fact that the quarterback the Bengals had from 2011 through 2019 was still under contract to the team.
Mainly, the mere prospect of the staid, stale Bengals landing a player oozing Burrow’s confidence and charisma seemed to reinvigorate a fan base that’s been beaten down by years of losing and letdowns, to the point that I had listeners, who’ve made bashing the Bengals a habit in the past, rush to the team’s defense when the narratives like “Cincinnati is a place where quarterbacks go to rot” or “Burrow should pull an Eli” would enter the conversation.
I had a blast talking about Joe Burrow in January and February. And in the early weeks of the pandemic-induced sports shutdown in early March, the struggles of not having the NCAA Tournament nor the opening of the Reds’ season to talk about were eased by being able to tap into Burrow topics for weeks leading up to the draft.
The challenge though, was after the draft since it was clear even by then that the run-up to Burrow’s rookie season would be unlike any other. NFL teams would be forced to conduct offseason training virtually. Training camp would not begin on time, and when it finally did begin, access to practice was limited. Reporters would not be allowed in the locker room, which means not nearly as many quotes about Burrow’s progress from his teammates.
And perhaps worst of all, there would be no preseason games.
I spent the late spring wondering how we would continue to talk about Joe Burrow if there weren’t concrete things like preseason games to measure his progress. I thought about how we’d continue to make him a part of our show on a daily basis if there weren’t tangible ways of charting his first NFL season. Weirdly, although it would have been more ideal to actually watch Burrow prepare for his rookie campaign, I found that the lack of anything to actually visualize from Burrow actually made it more fun to talk about him.
The unknown added intrigue, which built right up until he played his first regular season game, which was easily the most highly-anticipated debut of any Cincinnati rookie athlete ever. It also kept alive the overwhelming sense that Joe Burrow is the heaven-sent savior of pro football in Cincinnati. He’s the one who is going to lift the city out of the malaise that becomes a part of every day life when the teams never win.
For those who haven’t been keeping score, it’s been 30 years since the Bengals have won a playoff game, and 25 seasons – as of this writing – since the Reds advanced at all in the postseason.
We didn’t have a shaky Burrow rookie performance in a preseason game to douse expectations, and with not as many people at training camp workouts as usual, there wasn’t much footage of poor practice throws or tough rookie moments.
As a host, I had fun playing off of the unknown and I found it easier than I’d believed to be able to talk about Burrow. The lack of anything tangible added layers of unknown that oddly expanded the range of ways we could talk about the player and the team. Even if there would have been tremendous interest in Burrow’s first real game regardless, the weeks leading up to the season opener were, I believe, easier to talk about because of how little we actually knew.
I know this seems odd. As hosts, we like having as much information as possible. Game results, statistics, replays and quotes are at the heart of what we need to formulate topics and engage our listeners, and for a million different reasons, I hope we never again have an NFL offseason like 2020’s, but I did enjoy the challenge of having to talk about a player and team that’s important to my audience while not having nearly as much info to go on.
It made me a more creative host. And frankly, as one who at times wrestles with the most effective and modern ways of incorporating my audience into our show, I enjoyed putting larger focus on listeners and their expectations for Burrow and the Bengals rather than the long list of experts we normally would have had on to break down preseason games or training camp practices. And it gave us an abundance of fresh things to discuss and react to that we hadn’t already beaten to death once Burrow and his teammates were finally able to take the field to play games that count.
Navigating unknowns has always been a major part of being live on air, every single day. While I spent a lot of time during the sports shutdown questioning whether or not I was up to the task of executing broadcasts amid the insanity that’s defined 2020, I’ve at least tried to use the summer of Joe Burrow’s first NFL season to learn how to effectively use uncertainty as an asset instead of a hinderance. While I’m still nowhere close to as good of an on-air performer as I’d like to be, I think I am a better radio host because of it.
