Stream It Or Skip It: ‘30 for 30: Al Davis vs. the NFL’ on ESPN, in Which NFL Legends are Reanimated Via Deepfake Technology

Former National Football League commissioner Pete Rozelle and Oakland/Los Angeles (and now Las Vegas) Raiders owner Al Davis are dead, but you wouldn’t know it watching ESPN’s latest 30 for 30 outing, Al Davis vs. the NFL. Director Ken Rodgers — an NFL Films vet who’s showrunner for HBO’s Hard Knocks doc series and helmed four previous 30 for 30s — used deepfake technology to reanimate the two men, whose decades-long rivalry is part of NFL lore. Such digital trickeration allows Rozelle and Davis to tell the story in their own words even though they’re not really their own words — and here’s hoping the uncanny valley doesn’t get in the way of a good football yarn.

30 FOR 30: AL DAVIS VS. THE NFL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Is that Al Davis’ unmistakable blustery East Coast brogue we hear? Is that Pete Rozelle’s signature nasally nice-guy voice filling our earholes? Not really! But they’re reasonable imitations, as are the actors-with-digital-faces hanging out in the Las Vegas Raiders’ new home, Allegiant Stadium. We also see the real, 100% flesh-and-blood Brent Musberger, the Raiders’ radio play-by-play guy, because he’s still alive, talking about what “a long, strange trip it’s been” for the team to finally land in a slick, fancy, brand-new stadium in a new town that’s never had an NFL franchise until now. It’s the culmination of Davis’ dream for the Raiders — a dream he never lived to see come to fruition.

The story begins in 1960, when Rozelle became NFL commissioner at age 33. Concurrently, Davis began working his way up the ladder in the American Football League; by 1963, at age 33, he was the Oakland Raiders’ very young head coach, and three years later, he was named commissioner of the AFL, which was growing in prominence. Davis violated an unwritten inter-league agreement by allowing AFL teams to poach free-agent players from the NFL, ruffling Rozelle’s feathers. A year later, Rozelle spearheaded the leagues’ merger, and when the dust settled, he maintained his commissioner position. Davis, miffed that he wasn’t considered for the gig, wasn’t keen on being Rozelle’s subordinate, so he returned to the Raiders’ front office as head of football operations and, in 1972, became part owner of the team.

Throughout the ’70s, as Rozelle built the NFL into a moneymaking juggernaut via lucrative TV deals, Davis fielded a popular and highly competitive team that reflected his brash mannerisms with rough, aggressive play, which is a nice way of saying they were dirty as hell. The outspoken Davis coined his catchphrase, “Just win baby!”, won a Super Bowl and earned a reputation as an “outlaw.” In 1980, he attempted to relocate the Raiders to Los Angeles, dismissing Rozelle’s insistence that team owners vote on the matter. The two men found themselves on both sides of a protracted court battle, and a beat or two after Rozelle lost the case, he had to award Davis the Super Bowl trophy after the underdog Raiders pulled off an improbable championship run — a scene that was the most awkward in NFL history until Davis relocated to L.A., and won another Super Bowl in ’85, putting poor Pete on the podium with his nemesis once again.

So Davis got to gloat, and Rozelle lamented that his job wasn’t as fun as it used to be. We see an old interview with Rozelle’s wife in which she says Pete smokes three packs of cigarettes a day when things are shitty. Davis’ legal actions opened the door for NFL teams to relocate at will and, in Rozelle’s words, “auction” themselves to the city that offers the most taxpayer money as incentive. Davis’ unapologetic demeanor and attempts to build a new Raiders stadium rendered him a constant thorn in the comish’s side. Rozelle retired suddenly in ’89, looking weary and defeated during a tearful press conference. It prompted Davis to express concern over Rozelle’s health, apparently oblivious to the fact that he stressed the guy out endlessly. Cue up the old footage in which Davis says he respected Rozelle, their conflicts were just business and that health and family superseded all else. Is there a good guy and a bad guy here? A winner and a loser? Who knows. It’s probably just in the eye of the beholder or something.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Straight Outta L.A., a 2010 Ice Cube-directed 30 for 30, addressed how Davis’ Raiders cultivated a large following of Los Angeles’ Blacks and Latinos, and inspired a cultural crossover with gangsta rap and football. (Side note: You should watch Rodgers’ far better 30 for 30, The Four Falls of Buffalo, a fascinating examination of the Buffalo Bills’ four consecutive Super Bowl losses.)

Performance Worth Watching: The guy doing Rozelle’s deepfake voice is remarkably good but also kind of a caricature at the same time, which is almost as distracting as the gigantic CG forehead on the deepfake visual rendering of Rozelle.

Memorable Dialogue: “Just win baby!!!!!!!!!!!” Also, the hilarious moment when Davis’ son and Raiders ownership heir Mark Davis calls his dad “a tough guy from the streets of Brooklyn,” when about an hour earlier, the doc called him “a rich kid from Brooklyn.” Which is it, bro?

Sex and Skin: No, Davis and Rozelle didn’t have angry makeup sex after their many, many fights.

Our Take: Rodgers’ attempt to tell this saga wholly from Davis and Rozelle’s perspectives — even though they’re both dead! — is noble in its focus, but it never really congeals into a coherent narrative. Talking heads are sometimes a visual death knell for documentaries, and the director avoids them, sticking with archival footage, the deepfake fellas posed inside the Raiders’ new stadium and a bookend mechanism in which Musberger records a podcast and interviews Mark Davis. But without some modern, third-party commentary, the story lacks the retrospective context to underscore its relevance: Beyond Rozelle’s “auction” comment, the film doesn’t even mention how Davis’ precedent opened the doors for teams to essentially extort municipalities for supplemental funding for billion-dollar stadiums — you know, so the Lions don’t leave Detroit to go ruin another city, to use a hypothetical. Teams, you’ll note, that are already worth billions and earn hundreds of millions in annual revenue, in a league that’s also worth billions. Sounds problematic to me. It also sounds like good documentary fodder. Guess we’ll have to look elsewhere for that angle.

Al Davis vs. the NFL also never really catches fire despite the colorful and incendiary figure in its title. The film falls just short of framing the conflict as the story of two flawed men of differing ideologies butting heads. Davis was a loudmouthed, passionate radical who hired the league’s first Black head coach and female front-office exec; Rozelle was a mild-mannered gent who valued level-headed thinking and always sought compromise. Both were shrewd businessmen who sought to maximize their team’s/the league’s financial viability. One could argue that they bolstered each other’s endeavors — Rozelle turned the NFL into a media juggernaut, while Davis put a highly marketable and nationally renowned team on the field. When they weren’t suing each other, one was yin to the other’s yang. Did they recognize that? Who knows.

But Rodgers fails to fully render Davis and Rozelle’s characters. Maybe he’s trying to avoid the hyperbole of headlines; maybe he doesn’t recognize the irony of creating digital imitations of these men without telling us much about who they were outside of football. The film is a bit of a mess, with smudgy timelines and a blurry thesis statement about Davis’ dream of putting his ass-kicking Raiders in a state-of-the-art stadium. And the deepfake thing — well, let’s file it under Failed Experiment.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Behind the distracting deepfake silliness, Al Davis vs. the NFL is a perfectly OK catch-all encyclopedia entry of a doc, maybe worth a view for those who don’t know the basics of the core rivalry. That said, it’s far from essential, and there’s a lingering sense that a better version of this story has yet to be assembled.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream 30 for 30: Al Davis vs. the NFL on ESPN+