Dick Ebersol, a larger-than-life figure in sports broadcasting, has resigned from his position as chairman of NBC Sports Group according to multiple reports.
According to the New York Times, Ebersol resigned from NBC Sports after being unable to agree on a new contract, but he has denied that he “clashed with his new corporate bosses” at Comcast. Ebersol will be replaced by Mark Lazarus, a former Turner executive who was named president of NBC Sports Cable Group earlier this year.
Ebersol first joined NBC in 1974, and was named president of NBC Sports in May 1989. He has led the sports division in various increasing capacities ever since. After Comcast officially acquired a majority stake in NBC Universal earlier this year, he was named chairman of NBC Sports Group, which not only includes NBC but Comcast’s cable properties as well.
Under Ebersol’s watch, NBC Sports has soared to new heights and occasionally fallen to ignominious lows.
His acquisition of the NBA in 1989 was a major success for the league and NBC, both of whom benefited from the Michael Jordan era. He legitimately turned NBC into ‘The Olympic Network’ by acquiring the rights to eight of the last nine Olympics. Sunday Night Football, acquired in 2005, is not only the most successful NBC program, but also the only sports program to ever finish the television season as the #1 show in primetime.
Between October 1995 and August 1996, NBC aired the World Series (shared with ABC), Super Bowl XXX, NBA Finals and Summer Olympics, an impressive stretch of marquee sports programming that remains unmatched.
Of course, things were not always rosy. There was the XFL experiment, which generated a flurry of criticism and led one paper to say that he “should be ashamed” (sfgate.com, 4/21/01). There was — and continues to be — the controversial use of tape delay on sports programming ranging from the Olympic Games to the French Open. There was The Baseball Network disaster in the mid-1990s, which led Ebersol to say that “we’ve been treated like scum” by Major League Baseball (latimes.com, 6/30/95).
NBC went three full years in the early 2000s without televising a single game from one of the four major professional sports. The network’s biggest weekly attraction at the time may have been the Arena Football League. It was certainly a far cry from the mid-1990s.
Through the years, Ebersol has remained one of the most respected individuals in the sports broadcasting industry. His departure figures to have major ramifications going forward, notably in regards to upcoming negotiations for the 2014 and 2016 Olympics.
(Information from the New York Times; Los Angeles Times, 6/30/95; San Francisco Chronicle, 4/26/01; SF Chronicle quote from Sports Business Daily, 4/27/01).
