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. “How do we entertain people?” says Rick Cordella, president of NBC Sports.
“People look to sports to kind of get away from their day-to-day lives and fall into the drama of a great competition and the storytelling that happens around the athletes and teams and people around the periphery of those sports,” Cordella says. “We always say, ‘How do we make big events bigger?’”
“The goal was to create a Sunday night destination and make ‘Sunday Night Football’ the most important game of the week,” says Flood, who joined NBC in 1986 as an Olympics researcher. “That’s a combination of the great talent, the great production philosophy and the hard work that goes into not being satisfied after every show.”
NBC broadcasts a college baseball game between Princeton and Columbia on May 17, 1939 during the New York World’s Fair installation where RCA and NBC introduced television to the U.S.(NBC/NBCU Photo Bank)
NBC/NBCU Photo Bank
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.
“We constantly ask ourselves the question: How can we make the best seat in the house even better,” Solomon says. “Athlete storytelling and the competition are the core of the Olympics, and we look for ways that we bring the viewer closer to them and explain the sports of the games evenmore deeply.”
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.”
“The LA28 Games are going to be live, live, live,” she says. “We’ve been planning LA28 since 2020, and it’s unlike any Olympics that we’ve ever designed. 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. No pressure.”
***
Games of Our Lives
April 1941First-ever NBC Sports division is created under the direction of longtime NBC announcer Bill Stern.
Jan. 1, 1954NBC televises NBA games for the first time.
July 12, 1955
From the Nov. 20, 1968, edition of Variety
April 8, 1974NBC telecasts Atlanta Braves’ slugger Hank Aaron’s historic 715th career home run, which broke Babe Ruth’s record.
March 16, 1979NBC Sports carries the landmark Michigan-Indiana NCAA men’s basketball championship game, which marks the birth of the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird basketball rivalry
Oct. 1, 1990John Tesh’s “Roundball Rock” is introduced as the theme for “NBA on NBC.” The propulsive anthem becomes synonymous with the end of the hoops showcase that carried the triumphs of such NBA superstars as Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant.
(Pictured top: NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” in-studio launch team of Cris Collinsworth, Jerome Bettis, Sterling Sharpe and Bob Costas in 2006)
This story is part of a retrospective series commemorating NBC’s centennial that Variety is publishing through a partnership with NBCUniversal.
