SAN FRANCISCO — Chris Berman is the living embodiment of ESPN history. He’s worked there for 46 years. But even he is blown away by the fact that ESPN will televise its first Super Bowl next year.
“I still have to pinch myself,” Berman told Front Office Sports on Radio Row ahead of Super Bowl LX about ESPN scoring Super Bowls in 2027 and 2031. “The only thing I can compare it to was the first time the Rose Bowl appeared on ESPN [in 2011]. Not the Orange Bowl, not the Fiesta Bowl, there’s nothing wrong with them. But the Rose Bowl …”
The 70-year-old anchor’s specific role for ESPN’s first Super Bowl on Feb. 14, 2027, is not yet decided. But you can be sure it will be prominent. After covering his 44th straight Super Bowl, the broadcast icon symbolically handed the baton to Scott Van Pelt down at SoFi Stadium to kick off ESPN’s loud-and-proud “Year of the Super Bowl” initiative with parent Walt Disney Co. for Super Bowl LXI.
This is not Berman’s first Big Game rodeo. In 2000, 2003, and 2006, he anchored the old ABC Sports Super Bowl pregame shows. But that was a different time and place. The yellow blazers at the late Roone Arledge’s ABC Sports looked down on ESPN as their inferior cable cousin. But ESPN subsumed ABC Sports in 2006.
Twenty years later, this will be ESPN’s show all the way.
When Berman joined ESPN just after its Sept. 7, 1979, launch, he was 24 years old. He hosted the 2:30 a.m. ET SportsCenter. The 24/7 sports cable network, headquartered in the hinterlands of Bristol, Conn., had fewer than 100 employees.
Nearly five decades later, Berman’s a six-time National Sportscaster of the Year and a member of multiple halls of fame. He can’t stand still for 10 seconds on Radio Row without being mobbed by fans and journos asking for pictures or an autograph. So we conducted our interview as a walk-and-talk, behind the scenes.
In May 2024, chairman Jimmy Pitaro and president of content Burke Magnus extended Berman’s deal through ESPN’s 50th anniversary in 2029. That will make “The Swami” (his longtime alter-ego when predicting games) the first ESPN employee to serve 50 years.
Berman still has his fastball. Consider his recent humorous narration of NFL Live anchor Laura Rutledge’s madcap sprint across the field at the Sugar Bowl, complete with his patented “Whoop!” and “You … could … go … all … the … way.”
Berman, or “Boomer” as he’s affectionately nicknamed, is famous for the hundreds of nicknames he has bestowed on players, including personal favorites Bert “Be Home” Blyleven and Andre “Bad Moon” Rison.
And nobody’s more closely associated with NFL coverage at ESPN than Berman. Just don’t get him started on some of the new ideas, like the NFL shifting conference championships to neutral fields. That’s O.K. for the Super Bowl, said Berman. But it’s not fair to take away the home field advantage from big physical teams in favor of track teams in a domed stadium.
“Championship games need to stay where they are,” he said.
Starting in 1981, Berman helped turn the once-sleepy NFL Draft into must-watch TV. When ESPN first landed NFL media rights in 1987, Berman and Tom Jackson joined forces for NFL PrimeTime. Before the internet, before cellphones and social media, before NFL RedZone, NFL PrimeTime was the place where addicted football fans went for their highlights. Put it up there with TNT Sports’s Inside the NBA and ESPN’s SportsCenter as the top studio shows in TV history.
As Awful Announcing wrote back in 2017: “You can’t measure the impact PrimeTime had on fans, fantasy, and yes, gamblers. Similar to the impact that The NFL Today had in the late 1970s for the pregame show, NFL PrimeTime had it for wrapping up the day in football.”
Then disaster struck. When NBC Sports gained the rights to Sunday Night Football in 2006, wily chairman Dick Ebersol wangled exclusive highlight rights to the TV window following the conclusion of late Sunday afternoon games. The reason? He didn’t want his new Football Night in America to get run over by Berman’s NFL PrimeTime freight train.
ESPN brass thought the trade was worth it because they got Monday Night Football. But after 19 successful years, the show was toast in its longtime time slot. Berman was furious, dubbing it a “fuck-up of the tenth magnitude” in James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s ESPN book.
NFL PrimeTime labored on at different times in different forms. But it wasn’t the same. Jackson retired in 2016. Then Berman turned over his stewardship of Sunday NFL Countdown to Samantha Ponder after 31 years in 2017. But Berman kept at NFL PrimeTime, his labor of love, with new partner Booger McFarland. And 39 years later the iconic show still lives on ESPN+.
Berman still marvels at some of the emotional letters he’d get from football fans. As he recalled, one read: “I don’t have a great relationship with my Dad. But one hour every week, I would watch NFL PrimeTime with my father. It helped me stay somewhat in touch with him. Now we’re really good.”
Female fans wrote Berman saying the show introduced them to pro football. The late Don Shula told Berman he picked up a scouting wrinkle or two from the show. Bill Belichick, the winningest coach in Super Bowl history, who won eight rings with the Patriots and Giants, was also a fan.
“Belichick said, ‘You don’t understand. My boys were young. I was defensive coordinator of the Giants. We always played at 1. We would go home at 7:30 and watch as a family, because we didn’t know anything else about what happened in the league. I’d watch it with my kids—who then became coaches,’” Berman recalled. “It blew me away. It still blows me away. Look, on my professional tombstone, that’s the first sentence: He did NFL PrimeTime.”
