Millions of NFL fans are again devoting a few hours each Sunday to watching their favorite teams, and one of the key players in those TV broadcasts is Drew Esocoff ’79, who is in his fourth season as director of NBC’s Sunday Night Football.
Esocoff started this NFL season without one of the icons of the broadcasting industry, John Madden, who Esocoff worked closely with on the NBC telecasts.
“John was able to make a complicated game simple to any viewer, and he was funny doing it,” Esocoff says in the latest episode of Colgate Conversations, the podcast series that highlights members of the campus community.
Before Madden decided to retire, Esocoff and his production team were frequent riders on the “Madden Cruiser,” the custom bus the broadcaster used to travel to games around the country.
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| Drew Esocoff ’79 has directed coverage of the NBA Finals and spent many years broadcasting college basketball and football games. |
“Once we got to a city that was our sole mode of transportation,” he says. “It was great, you had your own dining facility on there, restroom facilities, and you had John’s bus drivers who were as much a part of our production crew as anybody else.”
Esocoff talks excitedly in the podcast about Madden’s replacement, Cris Collinsworth, and how he thinks he has the potential to take the show in new directions with play-by-play announcer Al Michaels.
The TV broadcasting veteran shares a behind-the-scenes look at the “off-the-charts great game” he directed this past February: Super Bowl XLIII. It was the third Super Bowl he directed, and it was a thrilling affair as the Steelers beat the Cardinals in the game’s closing seconds.
Esocoff also directed NBC’s coverage of swimmer Michael Phelps’s amazing gold medal run at the Summer Olympics in Beijing, an experience Esocoff describes as a thrill of a lifetime.
He discusses how the Colgate connection, starting with Doug Wilson ’57, helped him break into the business and how much he now enjoys working with Ken Schanzer ’66, president of NBC Sports.
“There is this great network of Colgate people involved in the industry,” says Esocoff, who majored in political science while at Colgate.
To hear the full podcast interview, click to listen now or right-click and “save target as” to download file. You also can go to the Colgate Conversations page or iTunes page for more download options.