NFL pregame shows have long served as the ultimate appetizer for football fans. They’re designed to set the table with expert analysis, injury updates, and predictions ahead of kickoff. However, critics argue that increasingly crowded panels and extended banter have made pregame shows less compelling. Now, longtime sports-radio host Mike Francesa is criticizing the format during his Week 1 show.
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“You don’t have to be there at 12 for the pregame show,” Francesa said during his ‘Francesa Five’. “You don’t learn anything on those pregame shows anyways. They’ve become clown acts. They’re all standing around. They’re all acting like they’re simulating plays, they’re all standing up… It’s a joke. But you want to be there at one. Sunday at one.”
New York Post’s Phil Mushnick, back in 2020, highlighted that each network airs the pregame show in an identical, “useless” form. “Apparently we’re supposed to care about the answer, but we don’t, never have and never will. Yet the scripts never change,” Mushnick wrote.
Last season, the ratings added to such points of view. In 2025, FOX NFL Sunday led the numbers with 4.4 million viewers. But around 20-26 million viewers tuned in for the games that followed the show. The gap clearly suggests that far more viewers tune in for the games than for the pregame coverage.
The CBS pregame show took a different approach this time. “As we go downstairs for the sideline report, presented by ChatGPT, here’s Aditi,” Spiro Dedes said during the Jets-Titans game. The sideline report by CBS was presented by ChatGPT, and fans began slamming this decision because of AI usage.
That said, Francesa had nothing but praise for Scott Hanson’s RedZone. The show returns for the 18th season to capture the chaos of the early-window games and wraps up with a late window. But the show is no longer completely commercial-free, with 15-second ad units remaining part of its format. Still, the show appears to have more to offer than other shows.
“I know the times are changing and the games are on different days and they’re talking about the witching hour,” Francesa said about NFL RedZone witching hour. “Hey, the witching hour is still around. There’s nothing like the witching hour.”
Well, Hanson had also revealed the witching hour secret formula. He claimed that the formula doesn’t revolve around “wristwatch time.”
“What we’re trying to do on the backside, because when we do ‘witching hour,’ I go to the scoreboard,” Hanson revealed during his appearance on Pardon My Take. “‘Ladies and gentlemen, eight games going on across the National Football League. Five of them are one-possession games. In Detroit, in New England, in Miami, in Atlanta, and in wherever, Kansas City. And it’s the ‘witching hour’! When wins become losses, and losses become wins.’ Boom. We want to cut to one of those games that’s a one-possession game in the fourth quarter.
“So our director, Dustin Stern, has to be looking at the off-ramp for the ‘witching hour.’ You would think it’s just a simple thing. No, it is air traffic control trying to line up all the pieces to the right place.”
Hanson and his production team have proven that the ultimate sports television formula is to give the fans uninterrupted, high-stakes analysis as the chaos of the witching hour takes center stage.