History in the Making

CBS has broadcast more Super Bowls than any network in TV history.

Sunday marks the 21st time the network has hosted the Big Game since 1967, and it hopes the matchup between Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady will fare better than the last one it broadcast in 2019 — the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever.

The 13-3 Patriots win over the Rams was longtime CBS play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz’s first time calling a Super Bowl with Tony Romo. The duo isn’t worried about a repeat on Sunday.

“That won’t happen here. There’s going to be a big highlight coming at you every couple of minutes,” Nantz said. “We almost couldn’t write a better script for us going into this game.”

“This can be one of the great matchups in sports history,” Romo said about Sunday’s face-off. “Twenty, 30, 40, 50 years from now, this is the game people are going to go back to.”

Nantz and Romo’s presence in the booth for CBS should go over well with the roughly 100 million viewers expected to tune in on Sunday. Results of a reader poll in The Athletic suggest that people believe the duo and sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson are the best broadcasting crew in the business.

In some ways, the CBS crew lucked out. NBC was originally slated to host this year’s Super Bowl, with CBS planning to take 2022. The networks agreed to a swap two years ago for mutually beneficial reasons.

NBC gets to pair the Super Bowl with the 2022 Winter Olympics. CBS gets to do the same with this year’s Super Bowl and March Madness, and avoid competing with the Olympics.