ESPN's Steve Levy joins the pod, plus: the Jim Nantz chemistry question and Joe Davis backlash

So the basic idea behind the column is questioning if Jim Nance did enough to keep the chemistry of the Nantoromo booth as strong as it needed to be.

I make the point in the column that Jim Nance is one of the greatest sports broadcasters of all time.

And his work over the last 40 years has placed him in rarefied air as a storyteller, as a chronicler of the greatest athletes and the most significant events of recent sports history.

But there's a difference between being a tremendous storyteller and being a great chemistry builder in the booth.

And there's something about his football and his basketball work historically, not just with Romo, that deserves, that warrants, I should say, some questions.

Sports media is within its right, I believe, to question how much Jim Nantz's style is and his preferences, his tendencies as a football and basketball play-by-play announcer, how much those tendencies help an analyst like a Romo or a J.J. Watt grow and develop.

And what I really did was compared Nance's work with Romo to maybe Ian Eagle's work with Watt or Vern Lundquist and Bill Raftery who were just an outstanding team when they were together back in the 2000s and the 2010s as CBS's number two college basketball team.

There's always been a certain level of vitality that Nance's play-by-play has sort of lacked.

and so whereas with golf he can paint this picture and it can be elegant and eloquent and just emotional and sentimental with football and basketball that chemistry that you need that makes a booth really enjoyable I raised the question if we've ever really truly had that out of Jim Nance.

And I think I made a point just to really challenge sports media to question his football and his basketball play-by-play from the standpoint of, has he done as great a job as he's needed to or as he could have in building chemistry with his partners?

And, you know, it's such an interesting topic because people are as people are, right? So we see the comments, oh, man, you can't blame Jim Nance for Tony Romo getting, you know, an OWI.

Well, yeah, nobody did that.

Read the article, right? But the fact of the matter is there's always going to be people who see in a criticism like this something that's not actually being said.

Nobody is suggesting that Jim Nance is not one of the greatest announcers of all time.

He clearly is, but everybody's got a different skill set.

And the fact is that Jim's skillset is not necessarily suited to having a big time partner, which kind of makes sense, right? I mean, it wasn't always the case that the analyst was supposed to be a superstar, right? Bob Trumpy wasn't supposed to be a superstar.

Paul McGuire wasn't supposed to be a superstar.

I mean, John Madden was.

And, you know, the interesting thing about that is that Pat Summerall was also not necessarily the most bursting with charisma announcer, but he also wasn't necessarily a storyteller.

He would lay out enough that John Madden could do his work.

Think about why CBS went with Summerall and Madden back in 81 and not Scully and Madden.

A Scully-Madden booth would not have been as strong.

Why? Because Scully's a storyteller and that's why baseball fit him so beautifully.

You had all this time to paint this amazing picture and talk about the cotton candy colored sky and talk about the uniquenesses of the smell of the grass and The wonderment of the sport and the childlike atmosphere and the aura.

Vince Cully had time to do that in a sport like baseball.