Wednesday’s sports media column from USA Today’s Michael Hiestand is chock full of information.
Like the sports media thoughts, we’ll handle them in bullet form.
- First, NBC will announce its Olympic talent roster along with its programming schedule. And Wednesday’s announcement will mark a month until the Opening Ceremony in London. That will be fun to watch. In Hiestand’s column, we find that Michelle Beadle will be the morning host for NBC Sports Network’s Olympic program which will begin at 4 a.m. ET. Other hosts on NBCSN will be Willie Geist (why?) of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and Liam McHugh. NBCSN’s coverage will last until the NBC Mothership hits the air in primetime.
NBC will unveil other plans during a media conference call to be held Wednesday in New York. I already know of a couple of announcing assignments, but I’ll wait until the press release is published.
- Hiestand also reports that ESPN has made a couple of changes in its Thursday Night College Football crew. We already knew that failed Texas U.S. Senate candidate Craig James would not return to the booth. ESPN had already declared that the Butcher of Texas would not be coming back. So David Pollack who has mostly been on ESPNU and the first hour of College GameDay with Erin Andrews, will be the second analyst in the booth joining incumbents Rece Davis and Jesse Palmer. ESPN is also expected to announce that Samantha Steele of the Longhorn Network will be the Thursday night sideline reporter replacing Jenn Brown. Samantha had a few assignments on ESPN’s Friday night games last season.
I expect an NBC press release on Olympic plans later today and I’ll be posting that when it finally arrives in the Fang’s Bites inbox.
