NFL Network’s broadcast crew missed the play twice in the same telecast, which takes a special kind of institutional indifference, because you don’t blow a marquee interception and then lose an entire touchdown to a beer ad by accident. You do it because somewhere in the truck, everybody stopped believing the football was the point of the broadcast. I didn’t watch a single live minute of this game and I’m still furious about it, because I know exactly what it costs to have the legal right to watch an NFL game in 2026, and the person who paid that bill on August 27th got a chicken recipe instead of the football he turned the television on for.
Damar Hamlin intercepted a Will Howard pass in the Pittsburgh Steelers’ preseason finale against the Buffalo Bills, his second interception in as many games, which matters a great deal for a defensive back still fighting to hold a roster spot. The NFL Network cameras stayed locked on Howard’s frustrated face instead of following the return, and only swung over to the play after it had already ended, turning the biggest individual moment of the night into something the audience had to be told about instead of shown.
Warren Sharp, who watches broadcasts professionally and rarely bothers being gentle about it, had seven words for the whole operation:
https://twitter.com/SharpFootball/status/2093124547675312136
That’s generous as hell. NFL Network isn’t running open tryouts in the production truck. These are the same people who point cameras at football for a living every single week of the season, and on the one play worth showing to justify a fourth preseason broadcast nobody asked for, they watched the wrong guy.
That would’ve been a forgettable footnote in a meaningless exhibition game if it were the only mistake. It wasn’t. Later in the same broadcast, NFL Network ran an extended beer-pour ad for something like fifteen minutes while Pittsburgh’s offense worked down the field, and a beer ad ran instead of the football that was actually happening live in Buffalo. Viewers came back to find out the Steelers had already scored, a touchdown that existed for them only as a number on a screen.
The reactions weren’t subtle. “This coverage is horrid. Not even covering the game at this point. Beer, interviews with random people. Chicken recipes…what in all that is holy is going on here?!” one fan wrote. Another, more simply: “I’ve never been this annoyed watching a damn preseason game in my life.” A chicken recipe. During a broadcast covering a defensive back fighting in real time to hold onto his job.
I take SEPTA to work every day, so I understand what it feels like to pay for a service and watch the people operating it forget the point of the thing they’re running. But even SEPTA doesn’t cut to a beer commercial in the middle of your commute and come back forty blocks later like nothing happened. I’m already paying over a grand a year to legally watch the NFL across whatever combination of apps and bundles the league has decided I need this season, and the entire premise of that spending is that somebody on the other end points a camera at the field. NFL Network took that money, took Warren Sharp’s attention, took every furious commenter’s Saturday night, and spent it on a glass of beer and a plate of chicken.
Sure, it’s a preseason finale, a game that means nothing in the standings. That’s precisely the problem. The broadcast’s indifference and the stakes for a player like Hamlin were running in opposite directions the entire night, and NFL Network picked the wrong one to care about twice in the same three hours. This wasn’t even the network’s first unforced error of the year, either — not the first NFL broadcast to step on its own game this year, just the first one to manage two separate failures in a single telecast that didn’t count for anything.
The Bills won 28-27 on a late two-point conversion, which at least made it to air. Hamlin is still fighting to hold a roster spot with the only team that gets to decide whether he keeps it. NFL Network doesn’t have to negotiate with anyone about how it treats the broadcast, which is the actual scandal buried under both of these blunders: the only people with anything on the line that night were the players, and the crew paid to show their work couldn’t be bothered to watch it.
