“Sunday Night Football” will feature a different sound this week.
Lead NBC NFL play-by-play voice Mike Tirico will miss Sunday’s Buccaneers-Bears broadcast due to an unspecified health issue, he said in a statement hours before kickoff Sunday afternoon, marking the first time he has missed an assignment since taking over as lead “SNF” voice in 2022. NBC’s #2 NFL voice Noah Eagle — who called Miami-Notre Dame for NBC about 90 minutes outside of Chicago Saturday night — will fill-in alongside Cris Collinsworth and Melissa Stark.
Tirico is scheduled to call Tuesday’s Celtics-Sixers NBA game for NBC, and it was not clear whether he will be able to make that assignment. He said that he expects to be back on “SNF” next week for Steelers-Bengals.
Buccaneers-Bears will be the first “SNF” game not called by NBC’s lead NFL voice since Tirico himself occasionally filled in for Al Michaels toward the end of the latter’s tenure. If one goes into the wayback machine, Pat Summerall filled in for Mike Patrick on four editions of “SNF” when the series still aired on ESPN in 2004.
Tirico had not previously missed any assignment for “SNF” or during his time as the voice of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football.” He had to leave NBC’s Kentucky Derby coverage mid-show in 2024 after suffering an allergic reaction due to a peanut allergy. Ahmed Fareed, who was on-site as a secondary host, filled in.
Eagle, it should be noted, was the designated backup voice for this past February’s Super Bowl in case Tirico was unable to perform his duties. Appearing on the Sports Media Watch Podcast earlier this year, he discussed how filling in at the last minute affected his preparation.
“Now, it happened, I guess, at the Kentucky Derby last year, and so I couldn’t completely discount [the possibility],” Eagle said in the podcast, but he went in knowing there was “no chance” Tirico would miss the game. Nevertheless, he attended the pregame production meeting and was given an extra version of the charts Tirico uses as reference points during the games. But he did not prepare to what he described as his “normal standard.”
Eagle: “The problem becomes when they’re not your version of charts, you really don’t know where things are. And he uses a lot of his own abbreviations, just like I use my own abbreviations, and so I can’t decipher everything on there. So like I said, it would have been a challenge, but I would have been OK. I would have been ready just in case; I’m glad it did not happen.”
There is of course plenty of precedent for announcers missing assignments; earlier this year, Brian Anderson lost his voice on the eve of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and was replaced on the first round by Jason Benetti. ESPN’s Mike Breen missed the first two games of the 2022 NBA Finals due to COVID and was replaced by Mark Jones. Going back more than a decade, Mike Emrick missed the first game of the 2014 Stanley Cup Final on NBC and was replaced by Kenny Albert.
