After a week off due to Hurricane Irene issues, the Sports Media Weekly podcast returns with a heavy hitter in tow. I’m not talking about myself or Keith Thibault of Sports Media Journal, I’m talking about our guest, the great Mike Tirico of ESPN’s Monday Night Football. And let me say in advance, this was one of our best guests that we’ve had on the podcast. We’ll definitely have Mike on again.
But before I talk about Mike’s segment, Keith and I talked about the news of the past week and that included another edition of “Free Bruce”, the actual freeing of college football writer Bruce Feldman from ESPN.com to CBSSports.com. We reviewed the latest developments in the story with Bruce trashing ESPN on various media outlets once he left the network, plus the ESPN Ombudsman story responding to Feldman’s claims that he wasn’t allowed to talk about the story earlier this summer.
We went from there to college football where the ratings were down for the opening weekend of play compared to last year. And we previewed how the NFL’s TV partners would cover the league this season.
As mentioned, Mike Tirico of ESPN was our guest and he was great to interview. The man is a true pro.
We began talking about his work at Monday Night Football and asking about which games he was looking forward to calling. We also asked him about the original upheaval in the first two years of MNF on ESPN to the stability he has now with partners Ron Jaworski and Jon Gruden. I asked Mike about his thoughts on covering international events like the World Cup in South Africa last year to covering the Open Championship across the Atlantic. We also broached how he’s true to his school, Syracuse University and the long list of sportscasters that have graduated from the upstate New York institution and whether he has a secret handshake with his fellow alumni. And we ended with him discussing the legacy of Monday Night Football and the short list of play-by-play announcers for the package (just four since 1971).
You can see this was a podcast chock full of information. Find the podcast on iTunes doing a search for “Sports Media Journal” or just go here to listen.
