A Highly Symbolic Change In The NFL Landscape: What Does It Mean For Sports TV Culture?
(ANALYSIS) If you had the opportunity to share a nice family dinner — emphasis on “family” — with a Hall of Fame pro-football coach, who would you choose?
For many Americans, maybe even most folks in flyover country, the National Football League legend Tony Dungy would be at the top of the list.
Of course, Dungy stayed super-active after retiring from NFL coaching. For nearly two decades he would have needed to fit that a dinner date into his schedule as a commentator with Football Night In America, the top NBC Sports broadcast for pro football. He also stayed busy with church gatherings and efforts to help children and the poor.
But Dungy will have a more flexible schedule after this bombshell news on X:
A report at People magazine filled in some practical details:
Dungy first signed on with NBC’s flagship broadcast in 2009, two years after leading Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts to a Super Bowl championship. …
Dungy coached in the NFL for 13 seasons, including six years with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He played three years in the NFL as a defensive back and won a Super Bowl with the 1979 Pittsburgh Steelers.
The father of 11 raised eyebrows late last season when he refused to share on FNIA whether he voted for former NFL coach Bill Belichick — whose New England Patriots were bitter rivals with the Colts — in the former New England Patriots coach’s first-ballot attempt to enter the Hall of Fame.
Yes, if you were going to pick NFL greats with radically different approaches to life and football, it would be hard to pick men with more radically different approaches to life than Dungy and Belichick.
It isn’t hard to pick the lowkey family man in that pair, right? Which of these 70-something guys has a 24-year-old cheerleader girlfriend and which is the father of 11 children (eight adopted) and, through the years, a total of 100 foster children? And, yes, who was a featured speaker at a National March for Life?
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.