Before he officially returns to NBC Sports Sunday night, Bob Costas discussed details of his emeritus role and what viewers can expect in an interview on the Sports Media Watch Podcast.
In a new episode of the Sports Media Watch Podcast that was taped Wednesday and will publish Saturday, Costas said that his position on NBC’s Major League Baseball and NBA coverage will be a “carefully, and I hope, thoughtfully and intelligently-crafted emeritus role that will not usurp anyone else’s,” stressing that “whatever role is carved out for me in any of these events or sports will be a role that is specific to me and in no way overlaps or overshadows anybody else.”
“My role will never be the primary role. I’ve seen myself as an emeritus guy or a contributor for a decade now,” Costas said, noting that he was supposed to transition into that role after the 2016 Olympics under his 2012 contract extension.
Costas will make his return to NBC on Sunday’s debut of “Basketball Night in America,” the pregame show leading into the network’s new “Sunday Night Basketball” NBA package. While he has voiced a handful of pregame teases for NBC’s NBA coverage this season — and will do so both on Sunday and again for the NBA All-Star Game — his appearance on Sunday’s pregame will be his first on any NBA telecast since he hosted Game 4 of the 2002 NBA Finals for NBC.
“I’ll be at Madison Square Garden. We’ll bring it on the air, and then I’ll pass it over to Maria Taylor with a nod to ‘the last time you saw me with the NBA on NBC was 2002; the Lakers completed a sweep of the Nets for their third straight championship. Now it’s a new era, new players, new rosters, new roster of announcers. Here’s Maria Taylor,’ Something to that effect.”
In addition to contributing to MLB and NBA coverage, Costas mentioned another assignment “that looms a few years ahead of us,” an apparent reference to the 2028 Summer Olympics. But he was careful to note that any role on that event would be limited. “If it works out, you could see me interviewing Michael Phelps or Carl Lewis or whomever — past American Olympians — but I should not be the person any longer who interviews the guy who just won the decathlon. That’s Mike Tirico’s job, or the job of someone at the venue.”
As evidenced by the talk of the 2028 Olympics, Costas expects to remain in the emeritus role for “a few years.” However long it lasts, the plan is for it to be the last role of his career. “If I hit the right notes, as I expect to, then it will feel right for everybody — and I hope for the audience — and it’ll be a good way to close out my career. It won’t close out in one year, but it won’t be much longer after that.”
Costas ruled out doing any play-by-play for NBC, though he seemed to leave the door ajar for a potential cameo as part of a possible NBA ‘throwback game’ broadcast on NBC. As in previous interviews, he noted that he can no longer perform play-by-play consistently as well as he used to: “I can do everything else if I’m being honest. I can do the interviews … I could do commentary, I can do essays. I could do everything I used to do, pretty much as well as I ever did it. But play by play is a different animal.”
He expressed regret about the quality of his recent play-by-play work on TBS, saying that contrasting that performance to his calls from the 1997 and 1999 World Series on NBC made it “even more clear” to him that he was no longer hitting his “lifetime batting average.”
Costas expressed gratitude for the ability to reconcile with his employer of nearly 40 years, NBC Sports. In his previous appearance on the Sports Media Watch Podcast, he detailed the way he and the network had gotten “sideways” over disagreements about his critical commentary about the NFL and IOC, leading to his quiet exit from the network after 2018. While he continues to work for MLB Network, he referred to NBC as his “true broadcasting home” and said that bringing his career full circle with NBC “feels 100 percent right.”
“Yeah, I’m happy,” Costas said. “It seems like things have wound up just the way I might have hoped. Now I just gotta make sure I don’t screw it up.”
The full podcast is available below:
