Jim Nantz wants Nashville’s Super Bowl 2030 to be the greatest event anyone has ever attended. He just won’t be the one calling it.
Named co-chair at a press conference at the new Nissan Stadium on Tuesday — where Nashville officially celebrated being awarded Super Bowl LXIV — Nantz made clear he intends to be as involved as possible in making the event a success, even if his role will be off the field rather than behind a microphone.
“Broadway is going to have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people there, whether they have a ticket to the game or not,” Nantz said. “The pregame show, the Super Bowl pregame show, is going to be launched from there before they move it into the stadium. People are going to walk across the Cumberland and come into the stadium. The celebrations are just going to continue, and people are going to walk away and say, ‘That’s the greatest event I’ve ever been a part of.’ You watch.”
He also tried to put the scale of what Nashville is hosting into context.
“If you actually took a Game 7 of the World Series, moved it here, Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the college football national championship, the Final Four — and then the last night you brought the Democratic National Convention and then you brought the Republican National Convention and you put them all in our new stadium — that total audience reach would not even come close to equaling the number of people that will watch our Super Bowl,” Nantz said.
Nantz has called eight Super Bowls for CBS, most recently Super Bowl LVIII — the most-watched telecast in television history — when he delivered the “Jackpot, Kansas City!” call after Patrick Mahomes led the Chiefs past the 49ers in overtime. But Super Bowl LXIV in Nashville, which belongs to NBC and Peacock, won’t be one of them. CBS will have Super Bowls in 2028 and 2032, which puts Nantz — who will be 70 in 2030 — in line to call both of those if he’s still broadcasting.
Nashville was reported as a front-runner for the 2030 game last month, when Dan Patrick said it was “signed and ready to go” — a claim NFL EVP Peter O’Reilly declined to confirm at the time – while acknowledging the new Nissan Stadium fell “within the window that could be viable.”
The NFL made it viable on Tuesday and named Nantz, a Tennessee native, as co-chair of the host committee alongside Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell.
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.