NBC Sports Leaders Reveal Culture Driving Record Investment in Live Sports
NBC Sports Chairman Rick Cordella joined veteran executives Sam Flood and Molly Solomon to discuss the division’s culture amid NBC’s unprecedented investment in live sports programming. Cordella, a 20-year NBC veteran, leads alongside Flood, executive producer and president of production since 1986, and Solomon, executive producer and president of NBC Olympics and Paralympics since 1990.
Relentless Improvement Defines NBC Sports Philosophy
The trio emphasized how NBC’s legacy of innovation continues to drive their work, highlighting storytelling as the core of sportscasting and examining how the Olympics became synonymous with the network. They also detailed the strategy behind Snoop Dogg’s breakthrough role as America’s guide to the 2024 Paris Summer Games and previewed elevated plans for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Our biggest agenda and goal is to always look to get better every week. Our theory is, if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. Ultimately, sporting events are about memorable moments. How do you highlight those memorable moments and get the audience to engage at a higher level because of how we cover it. And 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. What little things can we do to elevate the experience for the audience?
Sam Flood
There’s an innovative culture [at NBC Sports] that also has an expectation of a high level of execution. It’s incredibly wonderful to work for people who have high expectations, and then give you the room to be creative and supply you with all the technology and support that you need. And then something wonderful breaks out. I think you see that every single weekend at NBC Sports.
Molly Solomon
Blending Nostalgia with Modern Sports Presentation
Cordella explained how NBC approaches weekly productions like Sunday Night Football and the recently launched Sunday Night Basketball, drawing on the network’s 1990s NBA heritage.
What we do is always about the game, but it’s also about how do we entertain people because 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 within the athletes and teams and people around the periphery of those sports that we’re watching. So every week we try and do a great show on ‘Sunday Night Football,’ and then we took that more recently to the NBA and launched ‘Sunday Night Basketball.’ And that is based on the legacy of the NBA on NBC in the ’90s, which a lot of us grew up with, and the Michael Jordan era. We thought a lot about what worked in that era and how do we apply that to the modern ecosystem? We were trying to blend nostalgia with modern day, and I think we achieved that.
Rick Cordella
Four Decades of Storytelling Innovation Across Sports
Flood traced NBC Sports’ storytelling methodology from Olympic research through NASCAR, NHL, and other properties, describing how each sport contributed production innovations.
At NBC Sports, we are storytellers, which has been drummed into us since the day we began. Having started NBC in 1986 as an Olympic researcher, we learned the lessons of telling a great story, knowing what to look for, knowing how to make people care about the athletes, and we pride ourselves on doing that across every sport we cover. … I produced NASCAR back in 2001. When we started producing that sport, we looked at it. How do we make it not a regional sport but a national sport? And you learn things with each sport. From NASCAR, we took the idea of a pit reporter who’s inside the story. He’s running up and down pit road, getting collecting stories, or she might jump up on a pit box and start talking to her crew chief. From there, when we launched the NHL, we created Inside the Glass, where a former coach or player is stationed between the two benches so they’re hearing in real time what’s going on with both teams. So rather than two play-by-play analysts up five stories above the ice sheet calling the game as observers, we put someone interacting with the game and hearing it. And at one point, there were fights going on over our analyst’s head between the two benches. So it took you into the game in a different way.
Sam Flood
Olympics as Innovation Laboratory for NBCUniversal
Solomon detailed how Comcast leadership encourages using the Olympics as a technology and presentation laboratory, with Paris 2024 serving as a major modernization effort.
[Comcast chairman and co-CEO] Brian Roberts always says we’re a technology company and that includes NBCUniversal. And Mark Lazarus, the former chairman of NBC Sports, always encouraged us to use the Olympics as a laboratory because it can also give us a lot of lessons we can use across the company. I really took that to heart with Paris [2024 Summer Olympics] because I was very much motivated by the idea of, let’s see with the NBC spirit of innovation how can we transform and modernize the Olympic presentation. We constantly ask ourselves the question: How can we make the best seat in the house even better? Athlete storytelling and the competition are the core of the Olympics, so how can we bring the viewer closer to them and explain the sports of the Games even more deeply? With all of the choices the audience has, we have to uniquely position the Olympics as must-see content. We really focused on making improvements to our recipe for the Paris and Milan Games. And ultimately, the rewards were there for us. We took innovation to heart, but we also focused on surprise and delight for the audience. We had to make sure we were producing premium television that was a cross section of sports and entertainment, and it checked all the boxes for the audience, so we could aggregate these fragmented audiences that are so hard these days to consolidate. But we really aimed to create a product in primetime where you couldn’t turn away. FOMO was the desired effect, and it never hurts when you have Paris and the Italian Alps as your backdrop.
Molly Solomon
Snoop Dogg’s Unconventional Olympic Role Redefines Coverage
Cordella revealed that Solomon championed Snoop Dogg’s involvement, which exceeded expectations and earned media acclaim.
Snoop Dogg at the Olympics. That’s not something that NBC would have done well in the past. It was Molly Solomon’s idea, and we said ‘Let’s try it.’ He ended up being phenomenal both in front of the camera and behind the camera, and so genuine. The Washington Post in a headline called him ‘The Ambassador of Happiness.’ He didn’t want to just go to the men’s basketball team. He wanted to go see the weightlifters, and these other more anonymous athletes that toil in sports that maybe don’t get primetime on NBC, but just to meet them and hear their stories. A lot of that goes back to storytelling. It helps to have a fish out of water, so to speak, for views to experience it in a way. And we’ve had others do nontraditional sports coverage like Stanley Tucci talking about the Italian cuisine in Milan.
Rick Cordella
Olympic Legacy Rooted in Emotional Connection
Solomon connected current strategy to Dick Ebersol’s foundational philosophy of making audiences care about athletes and host locations.
The Olympics is such a part of the brand and the character of NBC and NBC Sports. They’re inextricable, really. When I think back on NBC’s Olympic legacy, it all stems from [longtime NBC Sports leader] Dick Ebersol’s philosophy that when you cover the Olympics, you must make the audience care about the athletes and the special place where the games are taking place. And we were always tasked with take the audience on a magic carpet ride to an intriguing locale and populate it with the finest athletes in the world, and that’s going to make great television.
Molly Solomon
LA 2028 Positioned as Generational Media Event
Both Cordella and Solomon described the 2028 Los Angeles Games as potentially the biggest sporting event of their lifetimes, with seven years of planning already underway.
I truly believe [the 2028 Los Angeles Games] will be the biggest sporting event of our lifetimes. We saw what happened with the World Cup domestically and how the country kind of coalesced around that event, and that’s just that’s just one sport, soccer. This is all sports. We may have an Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani gold medal baseball game from Dodger Stadium, which may be the 100th best thing that week. It’s going to be this awesome showcase of America to the world. We’re up for the challenge.
Rick Cordella
We’ve been planning LA 28 since 2020, so we are seven years in to an eight-year plan that is unlike any Olympics that we’ve designed before. We know how important every single second will be. 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.
Molly Solomon
Gratitude for Four Decades of Sports Broadcasting
Flood reflected on his career spanning 40 years in the industry.
We’re blessed to have the opportunity to do these things. There’s not one day where do I not think how lucky and incredible it is that I’ve been doing this for 40 years in our industry.
Sam Flood
This feature appears as part of Variety’s retrospective series commemorating NBC’s centennial, published through a partnership with NBCUniversal.
