This past season, a new broadcasting duos that premiered in the NFL was Ian Eagle and Charles Davis as the second team for the NFL On CBS. Eagle has been on CBS since 1998, but Davis was in his first season calling games for the network after being at FOX as an analyst since 2017. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not easy for the new pair to establish chemistry, but they found a way to make it work.
On the latest episode of the New York, New York with John Jastremski podcast, Eagle talked about forming chemistry with Davis during a pandemic. The two never had one in-person meeting during the year, but they decided to have a ZOOM call every week for five straight months. In fact, the trio of Eagle, Davis, and sideline reporter Evan Washburn only saw each other once in-person before their first game of the season together.
“I went into Week 1 thinking that it was going to work,” Eagle said. “We had Cleveland-Baltimore; we took one walk together in Baltimore on the Saturday before the game. The next time together was in the booth. It felt like we had been doing games for 10 years. It was easy. He’s a great teammate. It doesn’t always work that way. It really depends on the individual.”
Ian Eagle mentioned that although his role in the booth is very different from Davis’s, the duo have a similar idea of what a TV broadcast should sound like.
“I don’t want to ask him 12 questions on the air, I want to have a conversation. I know there are some out there that are like it’s your job to set him up. It’s your job to set him up but set him up in a way where you are conversing, not where it is pointed question, pointed question. That’s not a give-and-take, that’s not a partnership. You want it to feel like a couple of people that are at lunch or dinner and you are part of the conversation. That’s really important to me that it is both us and there is back and forth and Charles is a believer in that too.
In the early days of his career, Eagle knew the importance of good teamwork when he worked as the associate producer for Mike & The Mad Dog in 1992. Eagle said the duo were best friends at that time. He wanted to bring the energy he saw then to whatever he would do next.
“If you want to be excellent at this job, you better make the person next to you feel comfortable so they can do their best work. I’ve taken a lot of pride in that part of it, the dynamic between play-by-play and analyst. That was from the seeds of WFAN, seeing in the newsroom and watching it translate on the air.”
