Best Seat in the House: How NBC Shaped Sports Broadcasting With Historic Firsts, Innovations and Relentless Drive to Serve Fans

A century ago, NBC’s leaders were quick to recognize the importance of sports as a cornerstone of the fledgling national radio network. On New Year’s Day 1927, NBC carried the first coast-to-coast live broadcast of a sporting event, the Rose Bowl football game between Stanford and Alabama (which ended in a tie). Top-tier teams, leagues and events, cutting-edge technology and programs that cultivate the fandom around sports have been part of the mix at NBC ever since.

Today, with NBC firmly established as the U.S. home of the Olympics and the biggest of big-league sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and more), the division is guided by a simple philosophy. Cordella has been thinking about another milestone marked this year, the 20th anniversary of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” and its companion studio show, “Football Night in America.” The decision to carve out a Sunday evening gridiron showcase was the brainchild of former NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol, who steered sports and late night at NBC for more than two decades. Ebersol’s ethos was to up the ante on the production and presentation and to make the telecast entertaining for casual football fans.

The “Sunday Night Football” launch team included Cordella and Sam Flood, who is executive producer and president of production for NBC Sports. NBC was the first to bring baseball to radio and TV with nationwide reach. The network consistently invested in technology and resources to improve the presentation of the action on the diamond.

Harry Coyle, an NBC Sports staff director, cemented his place in sports history with his brainstorm in 1955 that a camera placed just right in center field would better capture a 360-view of the duel between the batter and the pitcher. And that setup that is still standard-issue for baseball today.” Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of NBC Olympics and Paralympics, has been with NBC Sports for 36 years. After rising to her current post in 2019, she was tasked with reinventing NBC’s Olympics coverage for a new era.

She was instrumental in the triumph of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. Fifty years later, NBCUniversal made an extraordinary commitment to secure U.S. rights to Summer and Winter Games from 2022 to 2032 for $7.75 billion. With just 23 months to go before the Olympics caravan alights on NBC’s home turf with the Los Angeles Summer Games, Cordella, Solomon and a small army of producers, artisans and anchors are gearing up for what Cordella anticipates will be “the biggest sporting event of our lifetimes.” He points to the sense of community that many Americans felt in June and July when the World Cup soccer tournament unfolded across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

We may have an Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani gold medal baseball game from Dodger Stadium, which may be the 100th best thing that week.” Solomon notes that time zone issues are usually the biggest issue that NBC faces in covering the broad menu of live Olympic events. But that won’t be an issue in 2028. We’re making sure that we are going to create the most compelling presentation in the history of media because this will be the greatest media event in a generation.