When Mike Tirico becomes just the 13th person to call the Super Bowl on TV on Sunday, it will mark the final, complete validation of a gutsy decision that transformed his career and sparked the biggest financial upheaval in sportscaster history.
In 2016, Tirico — after a quarter century at ESPN, in which he rose to hold the vaunted position as the voice of “Monday Night Football” — left for NBC as the potential successor to two of the most legendary presenters in history, Olympics host Bob Costas and “Sunday Night Football” play-by-player Al Michaels.
While the move was steeped in logic for Tirico, it was somewhat akin to a clean-up hitter taking the bat out of his own hands. He was a No. 1 voice at ESPN and was demoting himself to a reserve role at NBC, with the plan to eventually move back up in the order, but no definitive timetable.
Over the past decade at NBC, Tirico has had plum assignments — the U.S. Open on golf, the Kentucky Derby and Notre Dame football — but the full illumination of “Tirico: Decision 2016,” will be on display on hundreds of millions of screens starting Sunday with the Super Bowl and continuing daily through the next two weeks of the Winter Olympics.
Tirico will be the year’s most ubiquitous TV presence for U.S. sports fans, as he calls the Super Bowl with analyst Cris Collinsworth Sunday and then immediately heads to Milan for the Winter Games as prime-time host.
There is no doubt who has the bat in his hands now.
“It has been better than I could have ever imagined it was going to be,” Tirico told The Athletic.
It is as baffling now as it was then that ESPN let him walk out the door a decade ago. The 59-year-old Tirico said he likely would have stayed at ESPN if the network showed more urgency in negotiations. He didn’t really think NBC was a real option. However, when ESPN failed to sign him before free agency, NBC steamrolled through.
“Getting Mike Tirico from ESPN is one of the greatest heists in the history of our business,” NBC’s executive producer on the NFL, Fred Gaudelli, said.
For an only child, raised by a single mom in Queens, growing up dreaming of being the next Marv Albert, Tirico is a sportscaster’s sportscaster, with a rare dual ability to lead a studio and call play-by-play at the highest level. Headlining a portfolio of sports’ biggest events now puts him on the path to be considered among the all-time greats in sports TV.
A decade ago, NBC — led by then NBC Sports’ chairman Mark Lazarus, its executive producer Sam Flood and Gaudelli — recognized that identifying who was up next after Costas and Michaels was essential for the company and, to the executives’ astonishment, they had the chance to do it with one person.
What was not on their minds and was impossible to know at the time was how the Tirico move would transform the landscape of the sports media industry, especially the NFL.
The butterfly effect of Tirico leaving “Monday Night Football” and the disarray in its wake at ESPN led to the outrageous salaries for NFL game analysts, first with CBS’ Tony Romo’s $180 million deal and eventually with Tom Brady’s $375 million contract.
It should be understood that ESPN valued Tirico, but lacked an urgency to retain him that is still not fully explainable. He had grown up on their watch and succeeded Michaels on “Monday Night Football” when Michaels left for NBC two decades ago. Ten years after Michaels departed “Monday Night Football,” Tirico had established himself as a fixture. But he always wanted more.
“Mike, who is a humble guy, has a high ambition level,” John Skipper, who was ESPN’s president in 2016, told The Athletic. “I do remember on a consistent basis having pleasant conversations with Mike, where he continued to say, ‘I want to call championships and be in the seat when the big things happen. You guys are doing great. ‘Monday Night Football’ is great, but it’s not the Super Bowl. Basketball games are great, but I’m not calling top games.’
“We always kind of knew that was Mike’s ambition and where he wanted to be, and we didn’t have that for him.”
ESPN did not have a Super Bowl yet. The NBA Finals were Mike Breen’s, while the college football championship and tennis grand slams belonged to Chris Fowler.
During the negotiations with Tirico, ESPN dragged its feet, which Skipper attributed to the craziness of multiple branches of a company. Meanwhile, NBC was laser-focused on recruiting Tirico as the heir apparent to its duo of sportscasting icons, Costas and Michaels.
“They were planning for their next chapter,” said Tirico, who just turned 50 when he made his big career decision. “The timings of next chapters really synced.”
Post-Tirico, ESPN flopped around, unable to figure out its play-by-play position for Monday night. The lead play-by-play broadcasters are the ones that set the tempo and dynamic of big events.
ESPN’s first choice, Sean McDonough, owned the proper No. 1 skills, but was mismatched with analyst Jon Gruden. In 2018, Gruden returned to coaching with a $100 million deal with the Raiders.
Next on Monday nights, ESPN paired play-by-play voice Joe Tessitore and inexperienced Jason Witten with Booger McFarland, who for a little added dysfunction was inexplicably hoisted on a crane on air. The trio had never called even one NFL game before being paired in prime time, and it showed.
Finally, Steve Levy — a tremendous host, but not a top-tier NFL play-by-player — teamed with Brian Griese and Louis Riddick. The trio also had no NFL prime-time game-calling experience and, combined with the pandemic restrictions, had no chance.
The NFL noticed the disarray.
The ESPN era of decision-making to lose Tirico and launch the merry-go-round of Monday night on-air talent coincided with a deteriorating relationship between the network and the NFL, despite the fact ESPN was forking over a couple of billion dollars a year to the league. When Skipper resigned as president of the network in early 2018, Disney shifted Jimmy Pitaro into the role after nearly a decade leading a range of new media initiatives across the corporation.
Pitaro’s first and most pressing goal was to rebuild ESPN’s relationship with the NFL. On his way from Burbank, Calif., to Bristol, Conn., Pitaro brought Mickey Mouse’s wallet with him.
Initially, Pitaro flirted with stealing Romo from CBS. In 2017, Romo signed a standard three-year, $10 million contract with CBS and was a sensation, quickly drawing comparisons as the next John Madden.
In 2020, just prior to the onset of the pandemic, ESPN had designs on swiping Romo from CBS with a $15 million per year contract. With the NFL new rights deal on deck, CBS boxed out ESPN, giving Romo a seismic raise to 10 years, $180 million. Pitaro pivoted in the spring of 2021.
First, he signed Peyton Manning for an innovative, part-time, work-from-home set-up with his brother, Eli, that was part of a nine-figure production contract. That was the appetizer, as a year later, in 2022, Pitaro enticed Joe Buck and Troy Aikman from Fox — arguably the top NFL combo on air — on a pair of five-year deals for $75 million and $90 million, respectively.
Months later, in the final reverberation of NBC’s great Tirico heist and to replace the star power of Buck and Aikman, Fox inked the then-still-playing Brady to his 10-year, $375 million mega-deal, the largest known contract in sportscasting history.
Maybe some of that happens if Tirico remained at ESPN, but the cracks spread in both the “Monday Night Football” booth and ESPN’s relationship with the NFL, leading to the industry-altering repercussions.
Tirico said he had never thought of all the machinations all the way through, but he is happy for his old friends at ESPN.
“It was frustrating to see them try to figure out the next iteration,” Tirico said, before giving a nod to next year’s Super Bowl game callers, Buck and Aikman, as ESPN will finally have the big game. “I’m so happy that those guys are there, and the show is what it is now.”
Tirico said that if ESPN had come to him earlier with a strong offer, he thinks he would have stayed.
“Probably,” Tirico said. “I wouldn’t have imagined that NBC would have, one, interest, and, two, these opportunities.”
The way most top broadcasting contracts work is with six months or fewer remaining, a broadcaster can hit free agency and talk with other networks. ESPN allowed Tirico to reach his window.
“I don’t think it was deliberate or strategic, if we did that,” Skipper said. “It was probably just a function of being busy and crazy and always scrambling around. It feels like it should’ve been important enough to get there, but I think it worked out.
“We were pretty supportive. We couldn’t offer him what they were offering him — and they also paid him more money.”
At NBC, it hasn’t been all smooth for Tirico. When he first arrived, he expected to still regularly call the NFL, as NBC had “Thursday Night Football,” but the NFL contractually had “No. 1” broadcasters assigned to that game, forcing Michaels and Collinsworth into double-duty on Thursdays and Sundays. Despite formerly being a “No. 1,” Tirico only got occasional games.
Costas decided he wanted to move on after 11 Olympic Games, allowing Tirico to take the lead prime-time hosting role earlier than he expected, starting with the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea.
“I thought football was coming first,” Tirico said.
Michaels never wanted to leave NBC, home of the highest rated show in prime-time television, “Sunday Night Football,” and the chance to call more Super Bowls.
In his record-tying 11th TV call of the Super Bowl in 2022, Michaels had an excellent performance that night, but there was no real on-air send-off, because he continually petitioned to stay on the job. In the offseason, Michaels was shown the door as NBC moved Tirico up.
Tirico never publicly complained about having to wait on “Sunday Night Football” and even now says that everything worked out perfectly. For an ambitious type, maybe Tirico is right, as his resume is even thicker.
He hosted the Super Bowl pre-game four years ago and, after Sunday, will match Michaels, Dick Enberg, Greg Gumbel and Jim Nantz as the only TV personalities ever to both lead a Super Bowl pre-game show and call the game.
Tirico will also join Nantz, Gumbel and Curt Gowdy as the lone broadcasters ever to call the Super Bowl and host the Olympics.
This week, however, Tirico will stand alone. No one else in TV history has ever done that in the same year — let alone the same weekend. Tirico is pulling off arguably the most impressive — and widely watched — broadcasting combo in sports TV history.
Tirico said it has worked out better than he could have ever hoped. The kid who grew up watching Albert do the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. sports on the NBC local news with a Knicks or Rangers game call sandwiched in-between was at Madison Square Garden in Albert’s old seat this past Sunday night, calling the NBA for NBC as lead play-by-player as part of the network’s new 11-year agreement with the NBA this season and what NBC hopes is a new tradition modeled on its NFL partnership, “Sunday Night Basketball.”
Next up for Tirico is the Super Bowl, then the Olympics.
“When I look back, it was a significant decision to step out of a No. 1 chair,” Tirico said of his decision to leave ESPN. “Because you don’t know if you are going to get it back again, but I thought the chances were good that somewhere down the line that would happen.”
It’s all happening.
