Mike Tirico will make his Super Bowl play-by-play debut alongside Cris Collinsworth next month in Santa Clara.
NEW YORK — Even if the Houston Texans fall short on the AFC side of the NFL playoff bracket, one team will be making its Super Bowl debut in Santa Clara this February.
The 60th edition of the NFL’s championship soiree will be narrated by Cris Collinsworth and Mike Tirico for NBC Sports. NBC has the Super Bowl, set for Feb. 8 at Levi’s Stadium, for the first time since game 56, when Collinsworth’s Cincinnati Bengals fell to the Los Angeles Rams in controversial fashion in 2022.
“I think the chemistry is developed with just time on task. Mike and Cris spend a ton of time together,” Rob Hyland, the coordinator producer of “Sunday Night Football,” told Team FB7 at NBC’s “Legendary February” event at 30 Rockefeller Center. “We know exactly what Cris wants. Mike knows exactly what he wants from a football standpoint … That time spent together, Cris knows where Mike wants to go from an editorial big picture standpoint. So I just think time together and the number of reps they’ve had now over the last four-plus years, has really gotten them to gel.”
Collinsworth and Tirico are in their fourth season of full-time collaboration on “Sunday Night Football” since the latter succeeded the Amazon-bound Al Michaels on the play-by-play in 2022.
While well-versed in each other’s endeavors before the “SNF” link-up thanks to their residence under a peacock umbrella, both of their already well-traversed broadcast careers enjoyed a significant boost from their partnership.
“It hasn’t been any bit of an adjustment for me to learn or get to be around Cris. That’s been easy and fun,” Tirico said at the event at 30 Rock. “I could spend a half an hour on Cris, on how easy going is, how lucky we all are. The great thing about being around Cris is you discover a different angle of things. There’s the obvious angle, but if you start asking more critical questions, at which I think Cris is exceptional, maybe you come up with different, better ways to present the same game, information, storylines. I think that’s been it: his curiosity has just sharpened mine.”
Collinsworth has experience with the Super Bowl
“There are certain things that only I could understand, that he’s going through, and only he can understand. We know all the behind the scenes stories. We know what could go right, what could go wrong, what we did well, what we didn’t do so well. It’s a great relationship,” Collinsworth corroborated. “We’re really, really good friends too, which helps. That takes time to get there, but I really admire and respect him.
“That doesn’t come easily from me, but I really do, and I hope that people that watch the broadcast feel that or can sense that too.”
Collinsworth knows a thing or two about Super Bowl participation, as this will be at least the 15th to feature some form of the Florida alum’s talents: he called the 46th, 49th, 52nd, and 56th editions next to Michaels on NBC, the 39th alongside Troy Aikman for Fox, and sat at the studio desk in four more for both networks.
He also repped the Bengals in Super Bowl XVI and XXIII, the latter serving as his final NFL game on the field.
All that and more is to suggest that Collinsworth’s emphatic seal of approval for Tirico shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Super Bowl TV Partners Have Watched Relationship Grow
Approaching a decade of shared airtime (the two previously engaged in Thursday night action before its move to streaming), Collinsworth is still impressed by Tirico’s verbal prowess. In their most recent regular season game, the longtime color commentator was left mesmerized by Tirico’s humanization of Baltimore Ravens kicker Tyler Loop: only adding to the drama and heartbreak of Loop’s memorable miss in Pittsburgh, Collinsworth explained, was Tirico’s humanization before and after the launch.
“When you saw Tyler Loop missed the field goal, Mike had his life story,” Collinsworth recalled. “Here’s the moment of a lifetime for this rookie kicker and Mike laid out his entire story right before the kick. When he missed, you felt the pain of a human being in that miss.”
“Sometimes he just does things that are dazzling,” Collinsworth continued. “Through his Olympic experience and everything that he’s done, he takes the helmet off people. He makes you feel like there’s a relationship with that player. That’s not a robot out there kicking, that was a human being who’s going to have to live with this for the rest of his life kind of thing. I thought it was fantastic.”
A Super Bowl debut in the play-by-play role would be the crowning achievement of most broadcasters’ careers. For Tirico, it’s simply Sunday. The big game is only one part of Tirico’s February frenzy, as he and studio host Maria Taylor will make their way to Italy for similar duties at the Winter Olympics before the gridiron confetti clears.
Busy February Awaits Tirico
During the panel discussion, Tirico rejected Collinsworth’s humorous suggestion that he would keep the streak rolling by joining NBC’s leap into Major League Baseball coverage this spring. His colleagues nonetheless made it clear that no one was better prepared for the respective runs at silver and gold than Tirico, who has just reached a decade with NBC after transferring from ESPN.
“Mike is a television savant. Mike studies like television,” said 24-time Emmy winner Fred Gaudelli, now the executive producer of NBC Sports’ NFL coverage. “He got to watch Cris on Sunday Night Football very closely for six seasons When Mike was hosting [pregame show “Football Night in America”] from the site, he would come into the truck during the games, watch us in the truck, listen to Al and Cris. So I think he was really well-versed in what Cris liked to do, where he could go with Cris, where he maybe thought that he could do things with Chris that hadn’t been done yet. So I really give Mike a lot of that credit.”
“The chemistry just naturally comes about because they understand each other. They understand what Sunday Night Football is about, how it’s just not a regular football game. I think I couldn’t pinpoint one thing, but I think it’s that evolution and the way Mike studied it.”
Sunday evening: their final call before Santa Clara, as they’ll bundle up to call the Chicago Bears’ frozen fracas with the Los Angeles Rams to close out the Divisional round action (6:30 p.m. ET, NBC).
Geoff Magliocchetti is on X @GeoffJMags
Editor's Pick
2026 NFL Postseason: Playoff Schedule & Draft Order