Another NFL Sunday afternoon and there is Pam Oliver on the sidelines, where football viewers have come to expect her. It’s 1:03 p.m. ET, seconds after the opening kickoff of the Cowboys-Falcons at AT&T Stadium, and Oliver is delivering a report on Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott and running back Ezekiel Elliott being disgusted by the previous week’s loss to Denver. Said Prescott, as reported by Oliver, “We truly needed a punch to the face.”

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Multiple generations of NFL fans have grown up with Oliver delivering similar reports. She has been on the NFL sidelines for Fox Sports since 1995. (That is not a misprint.)

“I’m 60 years old,” Oliver says. “I’m proud of it. I’m not ashamed of being 60. I’m not trying to be anything I’m not. I’m a grown-ass woman. To me, that’s something to be celebrated.”

Hell, yes. On Sunday I made it a point to check in on the Cowboys’ 43-3 rout of the Falcons so I could see Oliver at work. We had a long talk this week on her career, her approach, her health and her professional survival at an age when many people in the business have been long discarded.

“Yeah, that’s a very real thing, and I’m not naive to that,” Oliver said. “You do feel it. You do feel that you are being looked at sometimes unfairly because of your age and how long you’ve been on the scene — and in my case with one particular company. I’m not saying there’s pressure from within, but there is pressure on women in general as you age to be a certain thing and look a certain way.

“I recognize that there’s a shelf life in this business depending on who’s running what company,” she continued. “That is very, very real. But I don’t go about my day giving that the time of day. Because however that’s going to shake out, it’s going to shake out. If anything, just as you reach a certain (age) milestone in your life, you think what happened? But at the same time, look at the wisdom and the experience and the relationships that you know you’re able to build over the course of that much time. I feel exuberant and excited for the future. I’m a lifer in this business, so even if things change with my current employer down the road, it will not be the end of what I’m doing. I feel that I can be a journalist for as long as they’ll have me. I mean the world, not just Fox. I’m a lifer in this.”

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Oliver worked for years on Fox’s top NFL team with Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. Seven years ago, as I wrote here for Sports Illustrated, her NFL sideline career looked to be over. But Fox management wisely changed course. Her crew today is Kevin Burkhardt and first-year analyst Greg Olsen. Like all NFL broadcasting personnel, Oliver is navigating another season through COVID protocols. She said she has enjoyed the work process much more this year as things have opened up around the league.

“It’s been joyous to me because last year you could not get anywhere close to a player,” Oliver said. “You were not in a stadium full of fans. You were sitting on a bench by yourself in this vast stadium and just going, ‘What is happening?’ But also at the same time, that’s a selfish thought because you have to understand where we were in this pandemic and where we still are. So at this point, just being in these settings, being at Lambeau Field and AT&T Stadium, and I got to experience Cleveland this year, where I hadn’t been there in a number of years. I made sure to take a couple of pictures near the Dawg Pound and said, ‘God, this is really, really cool.’ I’m not going to take for granted this season. I’m going to take it all in. I’m going to relish it. I understand that this could all change if we take a bunch of steps backward with this pandemic. We can find ourselves right back to where we were. So I’m living in this mindset that I’m going to have a blast. I’m going to enjoy this.”

Many NFL fans likely have no idea that Oliver started in news. After she graduated from Florida A&M University in 1984, her first job at WALB-TV in Albany, Ga., was as an agriculture reporter for the station as well as some general assignment work. She worked in news for nearly a decade because she could not land a sports job.

“Every place I worked, from Albany, Ga. to Huntsville, Ala. to Buffalo, N.Y. and then in Tampa, I was getting no traction being able to do sports for a living,” Oliver said. “I reached a conclusion that my fate is to work in news for the rest of my life. It was not how I envisioned it, but I was getting zero opportunities in sports. … I gave up. I said, ‘I’m destined to be in news.’ Then just one fateful day that changed and I never looked back.

“It was one Thanksgiving weekend and the normal reporter who was covering sports took the weekend off to be with her family. I volunteered to go to the Bucs game. They were coached by Ray Perkins, and playing the Green Bay Packers. The game was in Milwaukee and I went to cover it for my station, Channel 13 in Tampa. I ended up asking a question that people remembered and talked about. Ray Perkins said something to the effect that we were so bad, we couldn’t beat a high school team today. My question was, naturally, if you can’t beat a high school team as a professional team, shouldn’t you step down?” I saw heads whipping around and they’re like, who is that? But coming from news and having my B.S. meter set on high, I felt that was an appropriate question. I wasn’t doing it to get attention but it just struck me if that’s how you feel, if that’s how you’re going to talk about your football team, that means you’re not doing your job. It became a news story. My news director later told me this is the biggest step down and you’re never going to be heard from again, but I’m going to let you go from news to sports. He said nobody’s ever going to hear from you again.”

In talking to Oliver this week, I revisited a remarkable 2019 profile on her by ESPN’s Kimberley A. Martin, who wrote the story as a then-columnist at Yahoo Sports. It provided deep insight for readers on the excruciating pain Oliver has endured over the years, from chronic migraines to fibroids. That piece — I highly recommend it — also discusses the painful loss of Oliver’s older sister and coming back to work too soon from a concussion, the result of getting hit in the face by a football during pregame warmups while covering a 2013 Giants-Colts preseason game at MetLife Stadium. Oliver said the migraines come frequently.

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“I’ve gone from averaging five or six a month down to averaging three a month, and I consider that being lucky,” Oliver said. “But they’re very debilitating for me. They’ve been a problem for a very long time. It’s caused me to miss a few games over the span of my career because I just couldn’t take the noise and the light and the sickness that comes with that, the nausea and vomiting.

“I remember one game three or four years ago. I live in Atlanta, and I was minutes from Mercedes-Benz (Stadium) and told my driver that you’ve got to pull over. We were less than five minutes from the stadium and I’m hurling. My head is pounding. There was no way I was going to get through that game, be productive, help the crew or contribute in any way. So I turned around. I went home, and I felt so guilty about that for the longest time. But they really do knock me out of action.

“I tend to get them in my sleep. Saturday night I might go to bed feeling one way and then three or four o’clock in the morning, I’m completely aware that I have a full-blown migraine. I’m running to emergency rooms and urgent care. A team might hook me up with a certain doctor at this E.R. who will be able to help me navigate through it. It’s a whole production. I feel like they’ve gotten better just from the standpoint of having fewer, but they definitely are real and they continue to plague me. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. That’s just part of my health issue. A lot of people suffer migraines, but you do the best you can and try to stay ahead of it medically.”

As she often does, Oliver said she will reevaluate what she wants heading forward professionally after the NFL season concludes. She has been working on a memoir for a number of years and has kept a journal on and off for decades.

“I want it to be real and raw,” she said. “I don’t want it to read like a ’10 steps to success’ book. You can look at someone on TV and think everything’s perfect and great, but life can be hard and messy. I want to address my childhood growing up, my parents’ divorce and some of the ugliness that was part of that. But I also needed my family’s permission to be able to talk about some of the real unpleasant things that go on when your parents divorce. Those are some chapters that I’ve gone back and tweaked and rewritten.

“I’ve kept journals on and off my entire career, and I go back and look at some of the things that I that were so tragic to me in my late 20s. I’m like, ‘Who is that girl?’ And it’s me. Someone scared and terrified and not knowing if things are going to work out professionally and in your personal life. There are some career unpleasantness and some groups that weren’t really fun or welcoming or happy to see me. At what point do I want to divulge that? A lot of that stuff I’ve kept to myself or with my family and close friends. This has not been a bed of roses. When I’m ready, when it’s time, when it’s finished, it will come.”

The one takeaway that you always come away with in talking with Oliver is that she loves news-gathering. She loves telling stories. She likes people.

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“It was never my intention to be quote-unquote famous,” she said. “I just go about my job as if I did when I was in my 20s. Now I’m 60 years old, I’m still in love with journalism and still trying to be true to what the job is. It’s not about you. There’s a lot of that happening in the world today with some younger people. I always tried to step back and focus on the work and the people that I’m covering and just doing my job. That core of that has never left me, and I’m really proud of that because this is what I’ve always wanted to do. For all of these years, decades — and we’re not even including my news days I did that for eight years — that really formed me into what I eventually became.”

The Ink Report

1. The SEC on CBS will conclude at the end of the 2023 college football season as ESPN/ABC begins its 10-year deal in 2024 to broadcast the SEC’s biggest football games. That leaves a significant hole in CBS’s Saturday afternoon lineup, and conventional wisdom would suggest that the company will exit the big-time college football business. Not necessarily, says CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus, who addressed the topic at Sports Business Journal’s Media Innovators conference in New York City last week.

“The SEC has been great for us, and I think we’ve been really good for the SEC also. It’s the most valuable window in college football, the 3:30 (p.m. ET) window on CBS,” McManus said. “We plan to be involved in the business of college football, big-time college football, going forward, and I think to take advantage of that tradition we’ve established. You know, when we put the SEC on national television back in 2001, people thought we were crazy. ‘The Southeastern Conference? Who in the Midwest and who in the Northeast and who in the West is going to care about the SEC?’ But we promoted it, and we said ‘Every week at 3:30, you’re going to see the best SEC game.’ We grew it. I think for 12 years in a row, it’s been the most-viewed college window in all of college football. Whatever we decide to do, that window is still going to be available for high-profile, very watchable college football. We’ve got two more years to go on our deal.  We’re going to continue to promote it and produce it, and I think our production team is great. That’s part of the reason why it’s such a great window is (how) the games look and feel different the way our CBS team produces them.”

McManus added that the end of the deal “doesn’t mean we are not in the college football business. I think we will be aggressively in the future.” If that’s the case, the upcoming college football rights deal to watch would be the Big Ten, whose football deals expire with Fox and ESPN in 2024, and the Pac 12, whose deals run through the 2023-24 school year.

1b. An interesting note on the Saturday 3:30 p.m. ET window: ESPN President of Programming and Original Content Burke Magnus said at the same conference last week that ESPN has committed to putting an SEC game on ABC in the same window when the company takes over the CBS football package. But Magnus said that game will not necessarily be the highest-profile SEC football game of the week. With ESPN having the rights on all SEC football games, the company can mix and match on the best window between ABC and ESPN’s networks and afternoon and primetime for the highest-profile games.

1c. I asked Oliver about developing a relationship with a new analyst, as she has with Olsen. “You spend so much time together toward a common goal that you bond over the work — and then bond over your lives as you get to know each other,” she said. “With Greg, it’s been a smooth transition. We already have a million inside jokes. We’ve had our spouses dinner where we got to spend time with each other, not just our core group, but with our spouses. The majority of us went to see (former Fox analyst) John Lynch inducted into the Hall of Fame at his invitation. You do become close fast. I’m happy to say with Troy and Joe and Matt Millen and Dick Stockton before that, I’ve yet to have a group that I’m just like, ‘Oh, get me out of here.’ I’ve never had that experience because I think we all understand how fortunate we are. Yes, you’re going to have skirmishes. You’re going to have little bumps in the road. But that hasn’t happened yet. Kevin Burkhart is such a pro and a leader, and not to be corny, but you do become a family really quickly.”

1d. One other topic Oliver and I discussed was mentorship. Given her prominence and long standing in the business, Oliver is often approached by women who want to get into sports broadcasting or want to move up in the business. “That to me is always quite cool,” Oliver said. “I don’t just try to have these passing moments. I give them my phone number or my email so they can have access to me in a way that I can answer their burning questions, or they can feel like she really cares. They’re not bothering me. These young women are just curious. They want to know what this business is like, how they can get in, how they can succeed, how they can last. I’m really encouraged by the group of women that I keep running into. They’re hungry, they’re determined. They don’t necessarily want to be in that celebrity class. They’re not internet stars. For the mentorship thing, I’m very selective. Just because I met you once doesn’t make me your mentor. But I am here to give you advice. I’m here to do whatever I can do to help you succeed or answer your questions because I didn’t have that when I was coming up. I didn’t have someone in my chosen profession that I could dial and say “Hey, help me understand this.” A lot of it for me was kind of learning on the fly and figuring out as you go, which is fine. That’s just the way my path went. It would have been easier, but there’s nothing wrong with figuring things out on your own.”

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1e. As detailed well by Awful Announcing writer Andrew Bucholtz here, ESPN’s Adam Schefter made an indefensible decision to initially send out one-sided information (from NFL player Dalvin Cook’s agent) on a lawsuit accusing Cook of assault, battery and false imprisonment.  The Athletic’s Chad Graff has details of the civil complaint and Cook’s claims that he is the victim of domestic assault and extortion. Schefter has since apologized and was rightfully criticized for his initial work.

1f. My colleague Bill Shea examined what happens if Sinclair’s RSNs go bankrupt next year.

2. Last Wednesday, ESPN’s Monica McNutt made her ESPN NBA sideline reporter debut for Detroit’s win over Houston. McNutt worked for ESPN as a sideline reporter during the NBA Summer League — she’s worked as a host and analyst for ESPN, FS1 and MSG Networks — but this was a very big assignment for her.

“Listen, folks really need to put some more respect on the sideline reporter role,” said McNutt, who played college basketball at Georgetown. “There is so much to juggle in order to do the job well, and swooping in for a national game when you’re not with the teams regularly adds to that. Obviously, this was the biggest stage I’ve been on in this capacity. Ultimately, I relied on my basketball IQ, game prep and the terrific team that I was working with both in front of the camera and behind. I admittedly was unusually nervous leading up to the game, partly because of personal pressure in wanting to crush my debut and remain true to myself in this role.

“Once we got going the biggest difference to previous experience was the lights were brighter and more eyeballs,” she continued. “It’s very different from the analyst chair, in which I’m very comfortable. I was proud of my performance on the broadcast and certainly learned some things about the role moving forward. Big shoutout to (ESPN colleague) Cassidy Hubbarth, who crushes every game she’s on. She was more than generous in pep-talking and pro-tipping me all the way to tip-off. Rockets reporter and fellow former Big East hooper Cayleigh Griffin was also super-welcoming and supportive. Rockets analyst Ryan Hollins told me during pregame “You know the game, man, you’ll be fine.” That proved to be true. I’m slated to run it back on Dec. 8 for the Bucks at Heat, and I’m very much looking forward to that.”

3. Episode 168 of the Sports Media Podcast features Oliver and writer Lyndsey D’Arcangelo, the co-author with Britni de la Cretaz of the new book, “Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League.” In this podcast, D’Arcangelo discusses the origins of how “Hail Mary” emerged as a book; the challenge and fulfillment of unearthing something fascinating about an athlete or league from a previous era;  how the NWFL was covered by the sports media of the day; how the players looked upon those media experiences; the players’ pioneering role even if they did not realize it at the time; the finances of the league; women in football today, such as Sarah Fuller, and why that was predictably criticized by a segment of people; the advancements in women’s sports, especially in viewership, as a commercial play; the challenges of women’s sports today and more.
You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and more.

3a. Episode 167 of the Sports Media Podcast features Chris Jericho, who currently works as a professional wrestler for All Elite Wrestling (AEW), hosts the popular podcast “Talk Is Jericho,” and is the lead singer of the band Fozzy. The next wrestling PPV he will perform in comes at “AEW Full Gear” on Nov. 13 at 8 p.m. ET at the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minn. In this podcast, Jericho discusses the concept of professional reinvention and his ability to change his character over multiple decades for multiple companies; what he’s learned about reinvention that can be used by everyone; his approach to doing media; whether the media companies he has worked for dictate the press outlets he speaks with; how much he reads the people and publications who cover the business of professional wrestling daily; the importance of television viewership in professional wrestling and the 18-to-49 demo that advertisers want when they buy television time; if he follows how WWE does in viewership on Monday and Friday nights; why AEW has worked; the cool factor of the company; Chris’s role in bringing wrestlers such as Jon Moxley into the company; the success of Talk Is Jericho as a podcast; interviewing a variety of subjects from star musicians to paranormal experts to wrestling colleagues; facing criticism for some of his guest choices; the art of wrestling promos and how he prepares and approaches them; navigating the line of realism in promos and why sometimes that’s not a smart play; the prospect 0f Chris transitioning to broadcasting following his in-ring career and more.
3b. Some viewership numbers of note:

• Per Austin Karp of Sports Business Daily: NASCAR finished the 2021 season averaging 2.93 million viewers for its races on Fox Sports and NBC Sports. That was down from 3.058 million in 2020 and 3.110 million in 2019. The caveat is this year’s record-low Daytona 500 due to rain. If you excluded the Daytona 500, per Karp, the viewership numbers for 2021 are basically flat with 2020 and 2019.

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• ESPN said its NBA viewership through 12 nationally televised games had averaged 1.439 million viewers, up 20 percent from last year. Among key advertising demos, ESPN said its NBA game coverage was up 28 percent over last year in Adults 18-49.

3c. Ed Lucas, an inspirational blind sports journalist, passed away last week at 82. ESPN producer Willie Weinbaum passed along this SC Featured on Lucas, which is worth your time

4. Non-sports pieces of note

•Theodore J. Conrad pulled off one of the biggest bank robberies in Cleveland’s history. The case eluded officials for decades, until an obituary appeared online and family secrets began to unravel. By Eduardo Medina of the New York Times.

• His car was stolen from his driveway in Toronto. It was tracked to a Halifax port, bound for the Middle East. Toronto Star reporter Kevin Donovan tracks down his car with fascinating results.

• Is the President of Honduras a Narco-Trafficker? By Jon Lee Anderson for The New Yorker.

• She helped her husband start a far-right militia group. Now the Oath Keeper’s wife says she has regrets. By Del Quentin Wilber of L.A. Times

• A secret tape made after Columbine shows the NRA’s evolution on school shootings. By Tim Mak of NPR.

• What happened to Eric Clapton? By Geoff Edgers of The Washington Post.

• Radicalization’s path: In case studies, finding similarities. By Heather Hollinsworth, Kathy Gannon and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press

• Hot Streaks in Your Career Don’t Happen by Accident. By Derek Thompson of The Atlantic.

• Steve Bannon’s popular podcast is a ‘dangerous’ fantasyland of election lies. By Daniel Dale of CNN.

• David Graeber’s Possible Worlds. By Molly Fischer for New York.

• In the shadow of the Holocaust, a Jewish community takes root. By Ian Lovett of the Wall Street Journal.

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• Great thread here by the Canadian Forces in the United States.

• The Pentagon’s $82 Million Super Bowl of Robots. By David Montgomery of The Washington Post.

• The Cancer Celebrities. By Caitlin Flanagan for The Atlantic.

• Poison in the Air. By Lylla Younes, Ava Kofman, Al Shaw and Lisa Song, with additional reporting by Maya Miller, photography by Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica

• For five decades, Wayne Hankey cultivated a powerful persona as a professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax. Now, he’s facing charges in historical sexual abuse cases. By Frances Willick of the CBC.

• Churches Changed During the Pandemic and Many Aren’t Going Back. By Janet Adamy of the Wall Street Journal.

• Cresting the Wave. By Joe Hagan for Texas Highways.

• Why Facebook won’t let you control your own news feed. By Will Oremus of The Washington Post.

•.How two BBC Journalists Risked their Jobs to Reveal the Truth About Jimmy Savile. By Poppy Sebag-Montefiore of The Guardian.

• The Butcher of Havana. By Tony Perrottet for The Atavist Magazine.

• Via Andrea Long Chu of The New York Times Magazine: The Emily Ratajkowski You’ll Never See.

• How Walker County Jane Doe Was Identified at Last, By David Leffler of Texas Monthly.

• Drugmakers pushed aggressive diabetes therapy. Patients paid the price. By Robin Respaut, Chad Terhune & Deborah J. Nelson for Reuters.

Sports pieces of note:

• The Craziest Sports Story of 2021 Is FC Sheriff. By Grant Wahl.

• Jeff Agrest of the Chicago Sun-Times profiled ESPN’s Emily Kaplan.

• Worth listening to is the podcast featuring sports broadcaster, writer, and comedian Jenn Sterger on the subject of grace, forgiveness and finding peace.

• ESPN’s Baxter Holmes went inside Robert Sarver’s 17-year tenure as owner of the Suns.

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• How Masai Ujiri Builds a Team. By Louisa Thomas of The New Yorker.

• Can Overtime Elite, a new league funded by investors like Drake and fueled by social media, overturn the traditional pathway to the NBA? By David Gardner of The Ringer.

• In 1968, Eldridge Dickey became the first Black quarterback picked in the first round of the draft. What happened next derailed his life. By Michael Lee of The Washington Post.

• Kevin Garnett Is Still Breathing Fire. By Michael Pina of GQ.

• By John Canzano of the Portland Oregonian: Pac-12 deserves better than ESPN’s fuzzy, low-budget broadcast

• On Henry Ruggs III and the cousin I hardly knew. By Justin Tinsley of The Undefeated.

• The Disappearance of Peng Shuai and Tennis’ China Dilemma: Sports vs China, different lenses and ideologies, what can tennis do? By Matthew Willis.

• Via The Players’ Tribune: Eddie Kingston Got No Business F***ing Being Here.

(Photo: Matthew Pearce / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)