Rich Eisen had the opportunity to be the play-by-play voice for the NFL’s first ever game in Germany last Sunday with the crew from NFL GameDay Morning (Steve Mariucci, Kurt Warner, and Michael Irvin). Calling a game is something Eisen has done before for NFL Network, but he doesn’t get to do it often.
Eisen was a guest on the Green Light with Chris Long podcast this week and he told Long that the four of them did a rehearsal game back in October to get ready for Seahawks-Buccaneers in Germany. That’s when Eisen noticed something.
“We rehearsed for the Saints-Cardinals Thursday night game (late October) and all 4 of us went into some studio with a green screen behind us and mimicked what the setup was going to be like. I’ve done it before, but I hadn’t done it in years. I just noticed that I was talking a lot. There’s 3 other voices to get in there.
“By talking a lot, I mean like I was stringing sentences together because that’s what I normally do on this show for 3 hours and NFL Gameday Morning for 4 hours and it’s a totally different endeavor.”
Eisen mentioned that he reached out to get some advice from Al Michaels on how to let the game breathe.
“I told him I need to be a little bit more brief. I need to let the game breathe a little bit and he told me some great advice. He says calling a game, you speak in captions and ellipsis. By captions, he means just caption the picture and the ellipsis is like a dot dot dot in your sentence. You don’t need to finish your sentence. Let the picture finish your sentence for you.
‘”When you are describing a play and you’re seeing this incredible pass, you don’t need to say that’s an incredible pass. All you got to do is he throws. You use your voice to meet the moment. I wanted to have that sort of mentality and it isn’t easy.”
All in all, Eisen enjoyed the experience of being in Germany and said he thinks you will see an NFL game in that country more often in the future.
“It was incredible. It was just like any Super Bowl I have been to, to be honest with you. Weeklong build-up, you felt everything in the town. Huge event in the stadium, massive pregame ceremonies, Tom Brady’s playing in it….There was a whole different vibe to it. The stadium was sweet. It was just awesome. There’s doubt in my mind that the NFL’s going to have a game or two in Germany forevermore.”
