The big story coming out of the Monday Night Football doubleheader this week was the season-ending knee injury Browns running back Nick Chubb suffered in the first quarter against the Steelers.
The injury was brutal enough in the eyes of the ABC production crew that announcer Joe Buck said they would not be showing any replays of the moment Chubb got hurt. Dan Patrick said on Tuesday that he felt like not showing it at all did the viewers a bit of a disservice.
“Now you have to show it again to at least put it in context of what happened there,” Patrick said. “I would’ve done it. I would’ve done it once, because you’re carrying the game and I think you owe it to the audience. And you could do a disclaimer. And look, I might be in the minority here but if I was running the show I would say, ‘Alright Joe give them a disclaimer we’re gonna show this. Just let them know that this is a gruesome injury.'”
The consensus among the Dan Patrick Show crew was that showing it at least once was the move to make and then showing it from an angle that makes it less gruesome to watch. They recalled moments where other athletes suffered injuries and while hard to watch, viewers had a chance to see what happened for themselves.
But Dan said what it really comes down to is split-second decision making by the broadcast director.
“You have to make these decisions in the moment,” Patrick said. “I have the benefit of 12 hours here or whatever it is that I can go, ‘Well I don’t…’ In the moment, you’re the director, you’re the producer. You probably have your boss who’s running the network who’s gonna be involved in this as well. I think you have to show it once.”
