It just wouldn't feel right for me to sit down on a Sunday night, say a prayer to the higher powers of fantasy football and begin watching that week's NFL matchup without the voice of Cris Collinsworth providing analysis. Granted, I'm of a younger generation, and so the bulk of my life as a football fan has featured Collinsworth in that role.
But enough about me — this is about Collinsworth and how he, at least in his own mind, didn't think that he'd have a successful career as a broadcaster. There were some bumps in the road early on, as well as a busy non-football life to deal with after retirement from the NFL, and he didn't feel as though he was cut out for the broadcasting world. He joined Rich Eisen on "Just Getting Started" to talk about his career, starting with his first experience calling a game.
NBC's Dick Ebersol brought him on board as a "garbage broadcaster" — Collinsworth's words, not mine — to cover games that would only be seen by a single market, and it wasn't the brightest start for the former Bengals wideout.
"We finally get out and I go do the game, and I think I'm just literally brilliant by the time I get off the air. And I come back and a few weeks later, the same team comes back and does it again and they're all having breakfast at the local IHOP or whatever," Collinsworth recalled. "So I go down and meet them and I've got a big smile on my face and I'm thinking they're going to tell me how great I was, and I walk in and said, 'Oh what are you guys doing?' and they said, 'Oh we're just talking about the game, we all felt like we did a really good job... and then there was you.' And I go, 'Really?'
"And they started proceeding to tell me everything in the world I'd ever done wrong. I mean, it was like — I literally thought I wasn't sure that I was gonna make it through the four games that Ebersol signed me for. It was really like that. But they didn't want to hire anybody else, or nobody else would accept what they were paying me was probably more like it. I swear to you, we did a game on the west coast one time. My flight, the ticket to get me to the game was more than I was making doing the game."
Collinsworth had another potential career path in the making, too, as he had begun law school in his final years with the Bengals and was slowly but surely making his way through the curriculum as a part-time student. At that time, it seemed more realistic that Collinsworth would finish that track, and he shared that sentiment with his wife.
"I think I even told Holly one time, I go, 'Listen, I hope I'm a better lawyer than I am a broadcaster. This is not gonna last very long,'" he told Eisen. "I might be able to fake my way through the features and some of that stuff, but this is really hard. This is really hard. And somehow I'm still doing it, whatever it is, 30-something years later."
He reiterated that thought later, explaining why it was hard to pursue both law and sports broadcasting at the same time.
"...But I really thought, and I told Holly this multiple times, I go, 'Listen — this is gonna last a year, and then the next quarterback's gonna come out and they're gonna take my place, and then I'll go back and I'll be a lawyer,'" Collinsworth said. "Well, it lasted for two years and then when I graduated, I literally couldn't sit for the bar exam because you've gotta take at least three or four months and just go cram and study... I just couldn't do it, it was in football season. So I never did.
"I always thought that there was gonna come a time when I would just literally go, 'thank you very much,' shake everybody's hand, and go back and be an attorney, and I just never did."
Now here's a guy who made the right career move.
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