Kenny Moore II knows what it feels like to be nervous. The Indianapolis Colts’ cornerback has played in the NFL for seven seasons. Running out of the tunnel for a game still gets the blood going. Nothing quite prepared him for the broadcast booth.
Moore went through the NFL’s Broadcasting and Media Bootcamp — the league’s annual program for current and former players exploring life after football — and came away with a new appreciation for the people whose voices fill stadiums and living rooms every weekend.
In a recent Facebook post, Moore described wanting to quit halfway through the preparation phase, his head spinning from studying rosters, researching player and team storylines, sitting through production meetings, and walking through radio broadcast formats, all before anyone had even pointed a camera at him. When the actual tryout days arrived, with representatives from SiriusXM, CBS, Westwood One, NFL Network, and ESPN in the room providing real-time feedback after each session, Moore said the nerves hit him the way they did before his first NFL game.
“I thought I wanted to quit literally halfway through the prepping phase of it all from studying NFL rosters, player/team headlines, production meetings, walking through radio broadcasts, and more,” Moore wrote. “My head was spinning, but [I] endured through it.”
He made it through and came out the other side with something to say to anyone who watches or listens to sports.
“Please, please, please respect and appreciate the voices of those breaking down the games or drawing the pictures for you to understand it more,” Moore continued. “It’s a true art being the voice that brings everyone closer to tv/radio.”
What makes the boot camp disorienting for players isn’t the football knowledge. Moore has spent seven years studying film, breaking down tendencies, and absorbing information under pressure. The difference is that none of that translates when a producer is staring at you, and you blank on a player’s name mid-sentence. There’s no film room to retreat to, no walkthrough to slow things down. The preparation is relentless, the live conditions are unforgiving, and the mistakes happen in real time in front of people whose job it is to notice them. What the workshop offers is a controlled version of that, a room where you can lose your thread after a replay or stumble through a pronunciation and get immediate feedback instead of seeing an article on Awful Announcing.
Moore is hardly the first active player to come out of the boot camp with a new appreciation for the craft. Jason Kelce attended the NFL’s Broadcasting and Media Workshop in 2023, while he was still playing for the Eagles, and came away similarly humbled.
“This is all new territory for me. I have even more respect for it now,” Kelce told the Associated Press at the time. “It’s very hard to do something live, reactive of stimulus that just happened and having something clever and meaningful to say.”
Kelce, of course, eventually retired and joined ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown, where he’s become one of the better desk analysts in football. The boot camp didn’t hurt.
Moore may end up taking a similar path, or he may never touch a microphone again outside of a locker room interview. He hasn’t announced any broadcasting ambitions beyond the post, and maybe he never will pursue them. But something about a seven-year NFL veteran — someone who has played in hostile road environments, lined up against the best receivers in the world, and handled everything the game has thrown at him — saying the broadcast booth nearly broke him before he ever got on air is worth sitting with.
The job looks easy from a couch. Moore found out it isn’t.
“It’s a true art being the voice that brings everyone closer to tv/radio,” he said. “A sports legend in its own lane.”
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.