Mike Tirico, NBC Sports Host

In this episode of Talks at GS, NBC Sports host Mike Tirico discusses the evolution of sports broadcasting throughout his career, navigating sports coverage amid the pandemic and the intersection of sports and issues of racial equity.

On what interested him in sports broadcasting: “There are stories to tell that put a person inside that jersey or that helmet or those basketball shorts. And that’s what I think I learned at Syracuse – was how to tell stories, how to really take joy in sharing those stories and know that that’s really the currency of what we do to make it entertaining for viewers and listeners on a regular basis.”

On the future of sports broadcasting: “So all of a sudden, we’re in a very different time. The Stanley Cup finals were announced by someone a thousand plus miles away from his home. So what does that mean? That means there are going to be efficiencies that can now be built into the infrastructure of what we do to make it more cost effective, to make it a little bit easier to do at slight adjustments to how we’ve done business in the past. But I think you would say that if you’ve watched TV and watched sports over the last two to three months, the broadcasts look pretty similar. I can tell you first-hand having lived through a bunch of them, they are nothing close to normal. It takes about a third more time to do everything, and we’re not getting the same access or information that we once did. I worry about that in the long-term. I worry about that ability to story tell… I worry that that’s going to still be there because we don’t have as much time with the coaches and the players, hopefully in a year or two, when we are on the other side of the virus, we’ll have a chance to get back to that. But I do think our industry will be changed forever with the technology growth that we’ve experienced over the last few years.”