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Sports Business Awards

An unfiltered assessment of today’s talent on TV

One Sunday in the middle of the 2013 NFL season, Dick Ebersol was so enthused by what he saw on-screen that he reached out to Fox Sports President Eric Shanks, who was in Fox’s control room in Los Angeles.

Ebersol wanted to compliment Kevin Burkhardt, a new play-by-play voice calling NFL games. He told Shanks that the way Burkhardt called the game was one of the most refreshing things he’d heard on sports TV in years.

Ebersol, above with John Madden and Al Michaels in 2007, praises Michaels for his editorial mind, while he says former NFL player Tiki Barber, below with Ebersol also in 2007, “just refused to listen.”
Photos by: GETTY IMAGES (2)
“It is so hard to find young, new, seemingly experienced play-by-play talent because almost everybody who goes to school hoping to be a sports broadcaster automatically chooses to be a studio host so that they can be on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews, ESPNU,” he said. “I thought that [Burkhardt] lost some of that last year. I thought he was talking too much and guessing too much. … Do I think he can get back? Yeah, because those are all the kind of things that you can fix.”

Ebersol offered his opinion on

other announcers in the business:

Al Michaels: “He has the greatest editorial mind that I’ve ever seen from a play-by-play person in my life. He has so many built-in pieces of information. But at the same time, his ability on the spot to assimilate something new and have it come out in perfect, cogent sentences is uncanny.”

Mike Tirico: “I wish Tirico had [NBC Producer Fred] Gaudelli or somebody as a producer because he could be really, really good. He’s a very good talent.”

Jerome Bettis: “I love Jerome. He worked really hard, and I had great respect for him. It just wasn’t working out. He’s a wonderful guy. It was hard for him to say tough stuff about other players. This was a guy who, even when he was beating them on the field, they always had the utmost respect for how he played and what he represented.”

Tiki Barber: “Tiki just refused to listen. We kept trying to tell him that you can’t do it this way. You have to do this as if you’re sitting on your couch at home with your brother next to you and talking the exact same way you would do to him.”

Jon Gruden: “I don’t want them to talk about it like rocket science. If you start talking about the A-gap and the stuff that goes on with Gruden, you would not work for me. Ninety percent of the audience at home has no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think they know A-gap and B-gap?”

Mike Mayock: “He did Notre Dame for NBC. He would not listen. [NBC Executive Producer] Sam Flood did everything to get him to knock off [the jargon].”

Cris Collinsworth: “Collinsworth knows more about football and could be a head coach in a week — a good one. He knows who his audience is.”

“Dick Ebersol was determined to understand every aspect of the business. I have never dealt with anyone like him. I learned an incredible amount from him. I continue to do so to this day. I appreciate the fact that even now, long past the time that he was at NBC, he calls me with suggestions and advice. We talk about the industry. I still view him as a really close and valued friend. …

“Dick preached storytelling. It seems obvious, but he lived it. It is the way Dick watched television and the way he treated every moment of production. He saw the importance of every detail of the set, every detail of where the cameras were located in our arenas, every detail of the rundown of what happened from the moment the ‘NBA on NBC’ came on air until they signed off, the significance of the music that was used to introduce the game, how network promotion departments worked, how to fight for what we viewed was our fair share of promotion outside of the game broadcasts, how to work with the announcers and other on-air talent, how to cultivate former players into star on-air personalities. …

“When Charles Barkley was still a player, I can remember that Dick was the one who said, ‘Let’s find ways to use him on air.’ That was before anyone was talking about Charles Barkley as an Emmy Award-winning studio broadcaster. Dick Ebersol had spotted him as someone who was going to make a great broadcaster. He has an incredible eye for talent.”

— Adam Silver,
NBA commissioner
Dan Patrick: “He has his life exactly the way he wants it. He’s living at home, drives a couple of blocks and he has an office over the Subway store where he does his show. He has his national thing for four or five months of the year as host of ‘Football Night in America.’ That’s a perfect outlet for a guy to have a national network show.”

Colin Cowherd: “If there was one guy in the American sports media scene that I would really like to meet and have dinner with, it’s Colin. I am mesmerized. My wife is a sports information junkie. The two things she listens to on her radio all the time are Sirius NFL Radio and Colin. When we drive back and forth to New York, we always try to make sure that we can hear him. His radio show is fascinating. He’s like Dan in the sense that he really has dug into things. He was talking about college basketball the other day for 15 or 20 minutes with all kinds of detail about how the game is in real peril, and the fact that it is so slow and you don’t know so many players and it’s so much about coaches. It’s all the things that I feel, but he’s so much more articulate and better at it than I am. He can do that about almost any sport. I’m pretty impressed by him.”

Mike Pereira: “Pereira was one of the most brilliant things ever done by Fox. They picked exactly the right guy. I kick myself nine ways to Sunday because I knew how wonderful Mike was. It was inspired by Eddie [Goren] and [David] Hill. Brilliant.”

Mike Carey: “Not everybody who does that is very good at it. The guy at CBS, Mike Carey, is not good. I think part of it was that he really wasn’t ready for it because he hadn’t had a lot of media exposure or training. He wasn’t ready for it.”

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