NBC’s Mike Tirico ready for his Olympic-sized feat at Super Bowl
MILAN — Mike Tirico was baptized on the day of Super Bowl I.
Sunday, the NBC play-by-play announcer will be baptized by fire.
Not only will Tirico call the Super Bowl for the first time, but he will stay on the Levi’s Stadium field after the game to remotely host Sunday night’s coverage of the Winter Olympics.
From football’s mountaintop to the majestic peaks of Northern Italy, it’s an unprecedented double play in the broadcasting business.
“We’ll keep the Super Bowl celebration threaded into the Olympic show — confetti, family moments, that sort of thing,” said Tirico, 59, who worked both events four years ago but didn’t call that Super Bowl at SoFi Stadium, instead hosting the pregame show.
“What I learned from Super Bowl LVI is that it’s possible to do this without cheating either job.”
Maybe so, but it requires the extraordinary organization and preparation for which Tirico is famous within the network. Each year, he distributes to colleagues a color-coded calendar — a different color for every sport he’s covering that day — and the patchwork on every page looks like the Partridge family bus.
“Mike is the world’s best multitasker,” said Rob Hyland, coordinating producer of “Sunday Night Football.”
“This is in his DNA. It’s how he’s wired.”
Even for Tirico, however, the task is ambitious. The day after calling the Rams’ divisional playoff game at Chicago, he boarded a flight for Italy to check out the NBC studios in Milan. It was all part of getting comfortable with the setup.
On Super Bowl Sunday, hours before the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots take the field, Tirico will be up at 4:30 on the West Coast to watch Lindsey Vonn in the women’s downhill. He then will try to get back to sleep to prepare for his long day of football, knowing he will be running on adrenaline deep into the night. At halftime, he’ll carve out a few minutes to get up to speed on what’s happening in Italy.
On Monday, he and others from NBC will fly to Milan, with Tirico beginning his in-studio Olympics coverage Tuesday.
Tirico is just the 13th play-by-play announcer to call a national Super Bowl broadcast. He said Sunday will be like being back at Syracuse and taking three final exams in one day. He figures he will graze his way through the day but doesn’t plan to sit down for a meal, per se.
“They always say you should be slightly hungry when you take a test,” he said. “I subscribe to that theory on game day.”
Whereas preparation for the Super Bowl begins the moment the participating teams are determined, Tirico said his work on the Olympics has been years in the making.
“You want to be prepared but not over-prepared,” he said, referring to both events. “You want to know the important things you can get to during the game.”
The key is to use the information judiciously without overloading the audience with facts and statistics.
“With all that detail and information as granular as he can get, he never loses sight of what’s important for a mass audience,” Hyland said. “Mike is a unicorn. He’s one of one.”
As for Hyland, he’s one and done. After the Super Bowl, he will head home to Connecticut and become part of said audience.
“I’ll be playing the role of dad back on my couch in Southport with our six-month-old baby boy,” he said. “I’ll be watching the Olympics as a fan.”
In a sense, Tirico is a fan, too. There’s still a kernel of disbelief that this is his job.
“This is the thing that happens after you stop dreaming,” he said. “Because your dreams never let you get this far.”
