How to call a football play, Part 1 (radio edition)

And how creating a formula for how to attack each play can provide structure and rhythm to your call

Today’s Monday Masterclass focuses on the art of actually calling a play in a football game.

Afterall, this is called Play By Play University.

Part of what I’m striving to teach you is that 99 percent of the job isn’t calling the play. You’re a lot like a head coach in this regard. People think all coaches do is call plays, because that’s all they see, so the plays a coach calls end up disproportionately determining the opinion the public has about the job they’re doing. When it comes to calling the action, the same applies to you. You might be great at the 99 percent of your job that isn’t live play-by-play, but if you don’t nail this particular one percent, people might not feel great about the job you’re doing, and neither will you.

The game is made up of about 130 snaps. If you can do a great job calling most, if not all, of those 130 plays, you’re probably going to walk away feeling pretty good about your call, and you’ll likely have a drive or two that you’ll be excited to evaluate for your demo reel.

This week, we’ll focus primarily on what a play should sound like on radio, with a heavy emphasis on pre-snap considerations. We will zoom in on the live ball stuff in higher res next week. Also, calling on a game on radio is pretty different from calling one on TV. So we’ll save TV for another time.

Of course, there’s way, way, way more to a live gameday broadcast than just calling the plays. There’s the pregame and the postgame. The sign-on or the intro. Your ad reads. There’s how you reset the game coming back from break. How you transition into commercial break. How you handle downtime during video review, injuries, timeouts.

But the difference between the play and all those other elements is this: