Cris Collinsworth about to do his 500th NFL broadcast. Here's how he's had staying power
Mr. Preparation was unprepared for this.
Not until NBC informed him did Cris Collinsworth have any clue that Sunday night at SoFi Stadium would be his 500th NFL game as a color analyst. He wouldn’t have guessed that Tampa Bay at the Rams would put him anywhere close to that.
“That was just stunning to me,” said the folksy Collinsworth, still lanky and boyish at 66. “If you’d asked me, I would have said I’d worked maybe 250 or 300 games. … Wow, how did that happen?”
The former Cincinnati Bengals receiver, who once planned to be a lawyer after his playing career, has had 13 play-by-play partners, 17 seasons in the “Sunday Night Football” booth, 18 Sports Emmys … and a singular passion.
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“You’ve got to really love football, and that’s what it’s come down to for him,” said his son, Jac, a football host on NBC since 2020. “Growing up, he was always up at 6 a.m., watching film until we got home from school or practice. He’d eat dinner, then go right back down.”
Collinsworth has called NFL games in 52 different stadiums, quite a feat in a league with 32 teams (four of whom share venues). He has worked five different Rams home-game sites, for instance: SoFi, the Coliseum, the Edward Jones Dome and Busch Stadium in St. Louis, and Anaheim Stadium (now Angel Stadium).
“I spent 13 years with Cris and loved every moment,” said Al Michaels, who worked 263 games with Collinsworth, topping the list of most-frequent booth partners. “He has humor and understands the game on a level that’s almost unparalleled. There are others who understand it as well, but Cris has the ability to make it very accessible.”
Collinsworth likes to think of that as talking to 98% of the audience as opposed to leaning heavily into the granular shoptalk that might only appeal to football wonks.
“Cris is a broadcaster, not a narrowcaster,” said Rob Hyland, coordinating producer of "Sunday Night Football." “We’re appealing to more than 20 million people every Sunday night. We’re not speaking to a thousand football coaches. If my mom is interested in what Cris is saying, we’re doing the right thing.”
As his guiding principle, Collinsworth thinks of a question his wife, Holly, often poses to him: Why should I care?
“It's a great line, you know?” he said. “It's like, all right, I got to give people a reason to care. And if I do, they'll watch.”
That’s not to say he doesn’t do deep dives on the nuances of the game. He bought a majority interest in Pro Football Focus in 2014, a service that gathers detailed analytics and data to professional and college clients and has become a staple of NBC’s NFL coverage.
“He’s the smartest guy in most every room he’s in, and he never acts like it,” said NBC play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico, who will be working his 96th game with Collinsworth on Sunday. “Law school teaches you critical thinking, and that’s what Cris brings to everything.”
Collinsworth was a year away from retirement from the Bengals when he began law school at the University of Cincinnati. He would finish his studies in 1991, but by that time was two years into his media career, so he never took the bar exam.
He got his start hosting a local sports talk-radio show, which he later would call the hardest job of his life. He had to be knowledgeable on a mile-wide range of teams and topics — or at least be able to fake it.
“Every night is like a fistfight in there, and people think you're an idiot,” he said. “And there's no way I know everything I need to know about NBA and NASCAR and football. It's just a fight for survival, which was a great training ground for what we do.”
Joe Buck, who worked 56 games alongside him, said that radio experience honed Collinsworth’s ability to be comfortable and conversational on air.
“With Cris, I don’t ever leave a game without knowing why one team won and one team lost,” Buck said. “Seems simple, but that’s not always the case. He can be direct, and that sometimes angers a player, but it’s always well thought out and usually right.”
Collinsworth has successfully walked that line of being candid yet not crass, to always speak his mind even though his opinions often rankles fans of all 32 teams.
“The No. 1 question I’ve gotten for my entire career in every city, including Cincinnati and especially Cincinnati, is, 'Why do you hate the — fill in the blank with whatever their favorite team is?'" he said with a laugh. “So every once in a while I’ll say, 'Do you think I hate any other team?' and it’s, 'Nope. Just my team. That’s it.'"
Collinsworth lives in Fort Thomas, Ky., just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. He has a wide smile and an easygoing, self-effacing way about him. He chuckles at the memes and impersonations and notion that he’ll never pass an opportunity to compliment Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes. It’s all part of a job that never truly feels like work to him.
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“At AT&T stadium, we sit directly across from Jerry Jones’ box,” he said, referring to the Dallas Cowboys owner. “It’s essentially the same box. He paid a lot of money for his seat. We get paid to sit in ours. Anytime I feel sorry for myself, I remember that.”
Often in production meetings leading up to a Sunday night game, Collinsworth will ask a player, “When in your life did you first realize you were different?” It frequently evokes a story or thoughtful answer.
So, on the verge of such a lofty broadcasting milestone, precisely when did Collinsworth first know he was different?
“Hopefully next week,” he said. “Or maybe the next.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
