Mike Tomlin signed with Sandy Montag in March, hired one of the most powerful agents in sports media, and waited for the offers to come in. According to Andrew Marchand on The Varsity with John Ourand, they mostly didn’t.
“There really wasn’t a lot of competition for Tomlin,” Marchand said. “That was the interesting thing. He’s a guy, who, you go back 10 years, you’re putting together a list and you say who’s the future? Mike Tomlin was always at the top of that list from most executives.”
Fox had been considered the favorite as recently as January, when Tomlin stepped down after 19 seasons, and the network was sitting on an open chair at Fox NFL Sunday following Jimmy Johnson’s retirement after 31 seasons. The fit seemed obvious, but as Marchand laid out, the market that everyone anticipated never materialized.
“ESPN didn’t bid,” he said. “Fox, I don’t think, actually, put in a bid at the end there. I don’t know if CBS even met with him. And so, Amazon didn’t have a spot.”
The streamers that get floated in every one of these conversations — Netflix, YouTube — didn’t have the tonnage to make it work either. YouTube’s anticipated NFL package figures to be around five games, and as Marchand put it, what are you paying Mike Tomlin for five games?
NBC was the only network that came into the offseason with both a clear need and the willingness to act on it. Tony Dungy had confirmed he was leaving Football Night in America after the Super Bowl. As we previously reported, Rodney Harrison and Jac Collinsworth are unlikely to return, taking the entire on-site satellite studio with them, while Matthew Berry is also unlikely to return to FNIA. NBC was also planning to move the show on location every week, abandoning the Stamford studio setup it had used for years. What emerged from all of that was a show that needed to be rebuilt around a single voice that could anchor it.
“I think he did very well from what I understand in terms of what he got paid,” said The Athletic’s sports media insider of Tomlin.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.