REVEALED: NFL Sunday Night Football’s Color Commentator Cris Collinsworth Nearly Joined the NBC in a Different Capacity in 2006
For more than ten years, Cris Collinsworth has offered color commentary on Sunday Night Football. For eight NFL seasons, Collinsworth played wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals.
At the University of Florida, where he played collegiate football, he was named an All-American. He has won 17 Sports Emmy Awards and presently works as a sportscaster for NBC, Showtime, and the NFL Network.
Collinsworth nearly worked in the booth earlier, according to NBC executive Dick Ebersol. Collinsworth was a candidate for the play-by-play position, according to Ebersol, who mentioned it in his book Saturday Night to Sunday Night, according to Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk.
Cris Collinsworth nearly joined NBC in a different capacity in 2006
A new book by renowned TV producer Dick Ebersol chronicles his decades of expertise, including how he founded Saturday Night Live, mastered Olympic programming, and turned Sunday night into Football Night. There’s also a fascinating tidbit about the procedure that led to NBC recruiting Al Michaels and John Madden from ABC’s Monday Night Football in 2006.
Dick Ebersol's new book includes this nugget — before securing Al Michaels for Sunday Night Football, the plan was to make Cris Collinsworth into a play-by-play announcer, partnering him with John Madden. https://t.co/SwKjzWZWQf
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) September 29, 2022
Ebersol required a play-by-play announcer to work with John Madden. Ebersol came to the conclusion that “there weren’t any young up-and-comers” to match with Madden because Fox and CBS had contracts with their best commentators. Ebersol then took liberties. Cris Collinsworth, who had agreed to work in the Football Night in America studio, was at his disposal.
Although unusual, it was not unheard of for a former player to work as a play-by-play broadcaster. Collinsworth may have thrived in the play-by-play position, but everything seemed to have gone well for him.
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