While Mike Tirico has called numerous sports in his career for ESPN/ABC and now NBC, you won’t find him calling himself an expert at any of the sports he broadcasts despite how much he knows.
Tirico was a guest on The NFL Rhodes Show with Lindsay Rhodes podcast and he admitted he isn’t an expert at any sport. However, he feels he can have the best conversation about football and it comes from the time he worked with former NFL head coach Jon Gruden on Monday Night Football:
“None. I’m not an expert in anything. I can probably have the best nerd conversation in football because of my time around Jon Gruden. The eight years with Gruden, it was like getting a PhD in football. Jon came out of coaching and he wanted a team to coach. He would explain X’s and O’s stuff to us… I thought I knew all the nomenclature of football, but then as time went on, it was good. I can recognize plays from a West Coast offense. That’s the one I can have the best conversation, but it’s nowhere near an expert level.”
This year, Tirico will be in the NBC Sunday Night Football booth calling games with Cris Collinsworth. Since the two of them have done games before, the transition from Collinsworth going from Al Michaels to Tirico should be smooth:
“Cris and Al were as good a team as you will ever see. Cris, Al, and Michele [Tafoya] made SNF a terrific broadcast for over a decade, which is unheard of in prime time TV. I’m so blessed to have been around them and work with them. Cris and I did about 20 games together, so there’s no ‘let’s see if this works’. We know how each other likes to operate and I get along with Cris and his family and vice versa. I’m very excited about the fact that there’s not a huge discovery process to this.”
With Tirico calling sports on a national level, he told Rhodes that he enjoys learning new information, but it is now difficult for a broadcaster to just jump in and call a game because of all of the information that is out there on a particular team:
“I still do love sports and I still like it a lot, so I enjoy the discovery phase of it… Because of not just the internet and social media and bloggers who have rightfully built a really good following with their teams. They kind of thread the needle of covering the team, voice of the fan, opinionated, throw stuff out there, follow it really closely and have some credibility. That has now made it harder to jump in and cover sports on a national level.”
“In some ways, that motivates you, but it also makes the job harder because there’s more out there to digest and I think it’s a fascinating job for us.”
