I had a press conference Wednesday to announce that Rodney Harrison and I were coming on board as new members of NBC’s Football Night In America. It is the pre-game show for their Sunday night football game.
I’m excited about the opportunity for a lot of reasons. I had the chance to work with the NBC people at Super Bowl XLIII in February and they are a great team. Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports, and Sam Flood, the producer of the show, are the best at what they do, having won numerous Emmys over the years. The other members of the show, Bob Costas, Dan Patrick and Keith Olberman are veterans of the business and great also. By the end of the Super Bowl week I felt like I had learned so much. The whole production staff was so helpful in making me feel comfortable, it really felt like a cohesive team and that’s really important to me.
So it will be fun working with everyone there and trying to make the show the best it can be. I’ll also enjoy working with Rodney Harrison–even though he’s a former New England Patriot. We had many football battles against each other over the last six years, but spending a couple of days together with him was really enjoyable. I found out we have very similar ideas about football and about life.
With all the things I’m looking forward to there was one thing that concerned me– the time commitment. Because it’s a Sunday night show, though, I can go to New York on Saturday to prepare and really be home all during the week. My wife Lauren and I discussed it and we prayed about it quite a bit. We both feel it’s going to work out. In fact, Lauren really urged me to do it because she thinks it will keep me involved in the game that I love.
So we’re excited as a family and looking forward to the fall when we’ll watch my son Eric play for Plant High School in Tampa on Friday nights, and then they’ll watch me on Sunday nights. However, I feel like I did in 1977 when I was a rookie player with the Pittsburgh Steelers. There is so much that I don’t know about this job. But that’s part of the fun in life–accepting new challenges. And I can tell you from doing the Super Bowl, it’s not as easy as it looks!
