Andrea Kremer talks historic NFL broadcasts

Before Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit called Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football broadcast, Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer made history at Amazon as the first all-female, full-time NFL broadcast booth. Storm and Kremer called a streaming-exclusive feed of those games on Prime Video for four seasons.

At the time, Amazon had the streaming rights to those games, with Fox holding the linear rights. And Amazon offered several different commentary streams, including the TV feed of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, the Kremer/Storm feed, a U.K. English feed, and a Spanish feed. But the Kremer/Storm one stood out for the history it made.

On the next episode of the Awful Announcing podcast, Kremer emphasized the immense significance of her and Storm becoming the first all-female broadcast team for a major men’s team sport, not just football. It wasn’t just a win for them as a duo; it also held personal importance for her.

“It was not on my bingo card,” she told host Brandon Contes. “I was sitting right here in my office, and the phone rang. My agent said, ‘Would you be interested in calling games?’ And I paused, and the first thing I said is, ‘I can’t do that.’

“And he says to me, ‘Listen, this is all very premature. The offer might not come. We might not be able to work it out. We may not be able to get it in your schedule. There’s a lot of variables.’ But he goes, ‘I will never not accept that you cannot do it. Just take the meeting.”

Kremer describes how she and Storm communicated via text message. They agreed to the meeting with the Amazon executive, who immediately assured them this opportunity wasn’t a gimmick. Kremer conveyed their positive initial impression through their texting, and they remained receptive to the executive’s proposal.

“He was so passionate about it,” Kremer explained. “I found out later, much, much later, that the proposal that the Amazon executive wrote that he had to pitch to the higher-ups at Prime Video was written for Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer. It wasn’t written for two women; it was written for us. And if we didn’t take it or get it, there was no Plan B.

“And I’ve commended them because, as I’ve indicated to you before, we’re an option because that’s what streaming’s about. We may not be your cup of tea, but you cannot besmirch our credentials. Hannah is maybe the greatest host — male or female — of our generation. It’s just that simple. And I think that what she did, in terms of using her ability to be nimble, the ability to pivot to anything, that served her well.

“Because when I talk to other people in our business and tell them how we had to call the games, they are flummoxed. They just couldn’t believe the constraints that we had. We didn’t know any better, so we just did our best.

“She was amazing. We’d get things thrown (at us), and she’d be just so seamless. She’s amazing. I always like to say I should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for working with the husband and wife because Dan Hicks, her husband, was my play-by-play guy for three Olympics, so I got to work with husband and wife…

“And then for me, being an analyst, the first full-time female NFL game analyst, man, I was scared sh*tless. Two days before the broadcast, I’m in my hotel room and my phone rings. I look down and go, ‘Hello, coach.’ It’s John Madden. And he says to me, ‘Why didn’t I know about this? Why didn’t you call me? This is amazing. I’m so proud of you. How are you feeling?'”

Well, Kremer said exactly what she told Contes. She was scared sh*tless. And Madden reassured Kremer that there’s no need for last-minute cramming. He emphasized that her entire career has been leading up to this very moment.

“To have John Madden say that to me, my anxiety level, it went from like 99 down to like 49,” she says. “It was still high, but at least it was on the trajectory going down. And both he and Al Michaels independently said the same thing to me. They said, ’90 percent of the announcers don’t know what they’re talking about. 99 percent of the audience doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but everybody thinks it’s really cool.

“And I made a commitment. If I can’t explain something in five or six seconds, because hey, honey, I can talk the language of football as good as anybody. But if I can’t explain it in a short amount of time, then I shouldn’t be saying it. So, I don’t need to tell you about ghost motion or jet sweeps or cover zero or fire zone if I can’t explain what it is. Just because I think that’s an important part of analyzing what you’re doing.

“Do you have to say the A-gap when you can just say, ‘Hey, that space between the guard and the center?’ It just helps people more. And so, I was trying to formulate my own style in this, but it was hard, man. We’d be going into commercial, and they’d be showing replays so I have some idea of what’s coming and what I can say, and then we’d come out of commercial, and they’d go to a totally different replay. You just had no idea what was coming.

“It’s just like in journalism for all these insiders where you say, ‘Don’t worry about being first, worry about being right.’ That’s what I learned in analysis. Don’t worry about jumping in and being first; make sure you see what they’re putting out there because it may not be what you expect.”

During their first season, Kremer had a moment of vindication. In a 2020 Thursday Night Football matchup between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Chicago Bears, Tom Brady mistakenly believed it was third down when it was actually fourth. Kremer recognized the error instantly and called it out on the broadcast.

“I have to admit, and I’m sorry, not that there’s a tote board or anything anywhere, but my coordinating producer is sitting in another room, and he’s got our broadcast on, and he’s got the Fox broadcast on,” she adds. “He’s like, ‘Oh, man, you beat the Fox broadcast.’ It was just the little things like that. We had what I called our small but mighty team.

“We did our best. I cast no aspersions that were going to — I never, never, never thought that we would be the main broadcast team. I never thought that.

“I always hoped that we’d get a chance to call a game with our own feed. It was very disappointing that that wasn’t the case. But I know that Hannah and I made it abundantly clear, and it was then reciprocated back that we gave Amazon four years of really credible content that they could go to the NFL and get an $11 billion deal for that.

“When we won the Emmy for alternate broadcasts two years ago, the first thing Marie Donoghue, the Amazon executive, said was, ‘Thanks to Hannah and Andrea, because they started us off.’ I was proud of that… I’m really proud that we did this. I’m really glad we had these opportunities. Hopefully, they open doors for other people down the road, but I’m really proud that we were the first and that I was the first.”

The Kremer episode of the AA podcast will be released Friday, July 5. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , and wherever you get your podcasts. For more content, subscribe to AA’s YouTube page.

The post Andrea Kremer talks historic NFL broadcasts with Hannah Storm: ‘I’m really proud that we were the first.’ appeared first on Awful Announcing .