Sunday night’s game between the Lions and Chiefs sparked a variety of storylines that echoed deep into the week.
Along the way, the NFL committed an unforced error from its in-house media operation.
Via MLive.com, NFL Films posted a video from the show NFL Turning Point regarding Branch’s “long game,” which ended with a blow to the head of Chiefs receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster. The clip, narrated by ESPN’s Louis Riddick, was deleted after it was posted.
The league addressed the issue on Friday.
“NFL Films wants all of its shows to have a distinct voice and point of view,” the NFL said in a statement. “In the case of NFL Turning Point, that voice and point of view is Louis Riddick’s. He spends time every week with the show’s producers watching each segment and going over the script before narrating them. That particular sequence felt different to NFL Films as part of a 9-minute breakdown of the Lions-Chiefs game than it did as a standalone excerpt on social media. On X, it felt overly critical to Brian Branch so it was taken down.”
While it’s unclear why a clip would seem more critical when isolated from a longer segment containing the exact same content, that’s the league’s position. It’s also the league’s position that this was Riddick’s take, not the NFL’s.
Riddick apparently didn’t get the memo. He said the segment “was voiced by me,” which implies it wasn’t his “point of view.” Riddick also suggested that the end product was the result of a collaboration.
Regardless of the hot-potato manner in which NFL Films and Riddick seem to be handling the controversy, the Lions are pissed.
“I just thought it was a pretty weak move,” offensive lineman Dan Skipper told MLive.com. “Obviously, they’re protected by the shield, so I can’t speak too much into it. I might already have received a letter — we’ll see. I’m going to try to avoid receiving a letter here in the future.
“Look, BB is one of our guys, so seeing the public just keep digging is — I think it’s some [expletive]. I don’t know how many of the million people who saw it actually know BB. I know BB. So they’re going to do what they’re going to do at the end of the day. He’s one of us. He’s our guy. We got his back, and I think hypocrisy is going to be called out in the world.”
Defensive tackle DJ Reader agreed.
“I thought it was crazy — it is wild,” Reader told MLive.com. “You’ve got a video, you’re narrating it. I just thought it was insane and just kind of classless from that game. There were so many other things you could have gone with. You could have gone on a Chiefs highlight and released that. It was weird — just kind of weird energy from the league. From the league that you say is supposed to protect your players and this, that, and the third — whatever you say about it. I just thought it was strange.”
But here’s the reality. The league needed to justify its decision to suspend Branch for a critical Monday night game between the 5-1 Buccaneers and 4-2 Lions. And the league owns and operates NFL Films. Anything NFL Films says, the NFL says.
That’s what happens when sports leagues own the companies that create content regarding that sport. There’s no independence. There’s no true firewall.
And the Branch video is just the latest example of it.
While it’s far too late in the game to expect the NFL and other sports leagues to disband their in-house media companies, the audience needs to understand that dynamic and factor it into their decisions regarding the information they’ll choose to trust.
Usually, NFL-owned media merits skepticism for avoiding touchy subjects. In this case, Big Shield used its owned-and-operated media company not as a shield against criticism of the league, but as a sword against one of its players.