NBC Sunday Night Football asked my friend Nick Cade to put a team of creatives together to promote the 2022 season. They gave us the schedule and highlighted the games that mattered most. And one of them stood out on the schedule. One game that could be iconic and meaningful like the classic Sunday Night matchups are supposed to be. Tom Brady and the Bucs vs Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. The greatest QB of all time vs the greatest QB of his generation and probably the only guy who could go up against Brady’s legacy.

But NBC doesn’t look for football stats and insider details. They want emotion. They want talk value. They want hype.

Get press. That was the strategy. This spot is gonna play on Sunday Night Football the week before the game. Are the commentators gonna talk about it? That’s the strategy. You have Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes. Don’t screw it up. That was the strategy.

Growing up I had a bootleg cassette of Neil Young playing a show in Germany in 1972. He’s alone on the stage and he starts talking before a song and says something like, “This is a new song I wrote about my ranch. There’s this old caretaker who lives on the ranch and he takes care of the place…” and then he play’s Old Man. Just him and a guitar. And I always remembered that bootleg version of the song and how probably no one in the audience knew what Neil was even talking about but that song left a mark. 

And the song is perfect for this game. “Old man look at my life I'm a lot like you were” Brady’s the old man, Mahomes the rising star. “Old man look at my life, 24 and there’s so much more.” Both Brady and Mahomes won their first Super Bowl at age 24.” The NBC folks loved it. And I was pretty sure Neil Young would hate it. Neil doesn’t sell his music. “This Note’s for You!” he famously sings, “Ain’t singing for Pepsi, ain’t singing for Coke. Don’t sing for nobody, makes me look like a joke…

But if we could get the recording rights? Maybe we’d have something. So they did. And they asked us who we wanted to cover it and we had a bunch of names on a list and I think Dave Grohl was top of the list. And then NBC tells us, Eddie Vedder is gonna do it. He was in. Until he went to play some shows in Europe and there were all kinds of wildfires and the smoke was so bad it damaged Eddie’s vocal chords and he had to bail. But somehow, last minute, Nick shows up to the recording session and Beck is there. Nice that someone at NBC has Beck’s people on speed dial and can ask a favor!

Beck gets nominated for a Grammy. Neil Young is pissed and posts his displeasure all over Twitter.  The spot airs and Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth love it. We all get a bunch of nice press and the game is a huge success earning big numbers. The end. One of those projects that makes you remember why we got into this dumb business.