Once Mike Tirico is finished calling his first Super Bowl championship and the confetti flutters over Levi’s Stadium, he will quickly hustle down to the field and host prime time coverage of the Winter Olympic Games taking place nine time zones ahead. On the same field where the Patriots or Seahawks will be celebrating, he will anchor coverage of alpine skiing and figure skating.
From there, Tirico will stop by the hotel before catching a flight to northern Italy for the Olympics. It is a heavy workload by any sports media standard, but something Tirico downplayed at an NBC event last month. “It’s going to be easy,” Tirico said to Sports Media Watch of his 6,000-mile trek. “I mean, people who have hard jobs, they’d be laughing at us if they saw what we were doing. We have people who are looking after us, making sure we get there, taking care of the travel arrangements. We’ll sleep a few hours on the plane, and then, ‘Let’s go.’ It’s not that hard – it’s fun.”
In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, Tirico studied for both of his upcoming assignments and snuck in NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball” debut between the Knicks and Lakers. It is all part of a whirlwind stretch for NBC Sports that the company has referred to as “Legendary February,” the product of broader media rights deals totaling a combined $5.1 billion/year.
“There’s a reason why you certainly want Winter Olympics and our turn at the Super Bowl to happen at the same time,” Mike Cavanagh, co-CEO of Comcast Corporation, told reporters. “It’s always that way. That’s the way you want to go to the advertising market and not have somebody else selling against you. It just happens that we got the NBA All-Star Game, so it just happens that our ad team has to sell 75% – some crazy number – of all the ad dollars sold in the first quarter of the year.”
Live from the 50-yard line
Tirico is no stranger to the Super Bowl, having contributed to ABC’s ESPN-produced coverage in the 2000s, and he also hosted NBC’s on-site studio coverage four years ago. Like this year, Tirico covered the Super Bowl and the Olympics on the same day back in 2022. The key difference between then and now is that hosting and play-by-play are “far different,” Tirico said.
But Tirico said he will make sure not to let the challenge overshadow his appreciation for the opportunity. “We all work towards things in life, and maybe once we get there, we don’t appreciate the view,” Tirico said. “So just to try to be a part of this in a little bit different, more magnetic way to make sure that these images, these days stick. Take more selfies so we can look back and laugh at each other three, four years later to remember this, and just to enjoy it.”
Tirico will call the Super Bowl alongside “Sunday Night Football” analyst and former NFL wide receiver Cris Collinsworth, who previously worked with Al Michaels on four Super Bowl matchups. “First off, I think Mike’s amazing,” Collinsworth told Sports Media Watch. “I think he captures the excitement of, even ordinary games, better than anybody I hear, and he really has the ability to draw you into the excitement of a big moment, and now he’s getting ready to see the biggest moment of all with these Super Bowl championships, and I can’t wait to see what he does with it.”
NBC Sports is coming off of its most-watched NFL season since 2015, though that may be as much a result of methodological changes — the Nielsen expansion of out-of-home measurement and implementation of Big Data + Panel as currency for its estimates — as anything else. Those changes make it entirely plausible that, despite a relatively low-profile matchup, NBC could break the Super Bowl viewership record established just last year.
“I don’t know if I can do anything to make the Super Bowl bigger,” Collinsworth said. “It’s crazy, football in this country, right? I’ve been in some really fun scenes with television stars, movie stars, politicians, and no matter which table you’re at, people start with the NFL.”
Melissa Stark will be on the sidelines for her first Super Bowl assignment in 23 years, since she was the lead sideline reporter for ABC’s “Monday Night Football” alongside Al Michaels and John Madden. She will be joined by Kaylee Hartung, the sideline reporter for “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video, who is working her first Super Bowl assignment.
NBC Sports coordinating producer Rob Hyland will lead the Super Bowl production for the first time, opening with a segment featuring a memory booth that has been ushered across the country. For the segment, which will lead off the 6 PM ET bridge between the pregame and game telecast, the network spoke to fans about the meaning of the proverbial “Big Game.”
Going for the gold
Following a successful run at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, NBC is looking to repeat that success at the just-begun Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina. NBC Olympics president and EP Molly Solomon told Sports Media Watch that the network has the “amazing building blocks” in place to do so. Solomon: “With these athletes’ stories and with all the different ways we’re presenting the coverage, I think the audience really fell in love with it in Paris, so we’re really building on that for Milan Cortina.”
“[W]hen we had the privilege to buy NBCUniversal, I think we look at [the Olympics] as the absolute holy grail of what this company can do, what we can do for the nation, and the honor and privilege and responsibility to do the best job anybody could do,” Brian Roberts, chairman/co-CEO of Comcast Corporation, told reporters. “I think that Paris was a seminal event. We rebooted the Olympics. There was a lot of effort, and everything went as well as we could possibly imagine.”
Peacock will play a significant role in presenting the Olympics with the return of its “Gold Zone” whiparound experience plus multiview functionality, vertical video highlights and prediction games. The platform will have unique features surrounding football and basketball coverage throughout “Legendary February,” something that could lure viewers to the streaming platform as it looks to continue growing its business.
Even though Peacock reached 44 million subscribers to close out the last fiscal year, the segment recently suffered a $552 million quarterly loss, up $180 million year-over-year, that Comcast attributed to the cost of its sports rights. In remarks made before the earnings report, Cavanagh said that Peacock would continue improving its profitability despite the new expensive NBA package.
“I think it’s an important part of our ability to take the DNA of what makes NBC great – the ability to produce sports in a great way, to tell the stories of the athletes and bring it into a digital world through Peacock,” Cavanagh said to reporters. “It’s just part of what we want Peacock to be, full stop. It does actually happen to help engagement on the service. It does help build the service, and it’s always going to be an important part of it because the broadcast network, and in our case, Peacock, go hand in glove.”
Cavanagh stressed that while sports has contributed to the growth of Peacock, the company is anticipating a slate of pay-one movies such as “Wicked: For Good,” “Disclosure Day” and “Minions 3” among others. He rejected the premise that sports has become the proverbial heartbeat of NBC and said that it did not plan on being “a sports-only service.”
“February is not some significant big bet on Peacock,” Cavanagh said. “I mean, I certainly hope it delivers for Peacock, but it’s not designed to be. When we have the Olympics, we want the Super Bowl to be part of that package as we go to market. That’s always been the case. It just happens now that we got an NBA package that just happens to drop the All-Star Game right in the middle of it, so it’s kind of wild. But it wasn’t a strategy to say, ‘Hey, if we collect these three things, it’s going to be some wild month for the service.’”
Star-studded hoops in Hollywood
The NBA All-Star Game has struggled to recapture the momentum it once had, and there have been calls for the league to abolish the event altogether. Format changes have done nothing to reverse declining viewership or growing complaints about player effort.
Last year’s NBA All-Star Game averaged 4.72 million viewers, a 13% decline from the previous year and the second least-watched version on record. But this year’s game returning to broadcast television for the first time since NBC carried it in 2002 — and the same Winter Olympics lead-in it benefited from 24 years ago. With presumably a larger audience tuning in, the league is rolling out a new round-robin ‘U.S. vs. the World’ format.
“We’re going to bring our fresh storytelling approach to it,” Frank DiGraci, coordinating producer for NBA coverage from NBC Sports, told reporters. “I don’t think it’s been covered that deeply. It’s been more about the show. We’re going to make the game the star, the events the star.”
NBC analyst Carmelo Anthony, who in his first season on television, spoke positively about being able to build something new “from basically the ground up.” “I’m glad I’m able to be on this side and be with a company like NBC where we can tell those stories,” Anthony said to Sports Media Watch. “As far as Milan Cortina and the Super Bowl and All-Star Weekend and gearing up for LA 28, like, this is what we actually look forward to doing.”
Aiming to strike a harmonious chord
Anthony often works with former NBA players and real-life cousins Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter behind the desk. The trio is joined by NBC Sports host Maria Taylor, who is also responsible for anchoring “Football Night in America” and will host pregame coverage leading up to Super Bowl LX. Taylor will then travel overseas to Milan where she is hosting “Olympic Late Night,” covering the Games in a way that differs from the traditional primetime offering.
“The good thing about what we try to do on the late-night show [is] we treat it as a separate character,” Taylor said. “So usually, if you’re tuning in to late night, you’re looking for ‘SNL,’ you’re looking for Seth Meyers. There’s a certain type of show that you’re looking for, and we want to cater to that avenue, and so we want to have fun, we want to speak to the athletes, bring them in and play games with them, and you’re still going to see and have access to all the events that happened throughout the day.”
Taylor described the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics as “appointment viewing,” and said she hopes that the Winter Games will have the same effect.
Years of planning and anticipation have led to this moment where the stars have aligned on the schedule, and it is now up to NBCUniversal to execute the assignment successfully. In other words, the company is going for the gold.
“There’s something special about our ability to do live and do live at a super high level that others are and should be envious of because it’s taken the 100 years to get this company to where it is,” Cavanagh said. “….This is the 100th anniversary of NBC this year, and so what a way to start it off but with ‘Legendary February.’”
“The strength of the company – not just the sports division, but the network and the company – that there are teams to do this, the bandwidth to do this, the way our folks prioritize having sports as part of our portfolio,” Tirico added. “All of that together is what jumps out to me about us doing this, and to be lucky enough to get to touch all three of these properties here in this month as we start ‘Sunday Night Basketball,’ then get the Olympics off and going, and then the Super Bowl and then get over to Italy, it’s a pretty cool place to be able to do it.”
