NBC Sports’ Cris Collinsworth has great memories of working with late Len Dawson
NBC broadcaster Cris Collinsworth won his 17th Sports Emmy Award in May, and it was his ninth for Outstanding Event Analyst.
Although he jokes that he’s been calling football games for 38 years, he’s not far off. He’s been in broadcasting for 34 years, which is remarkable since he’d had a firm plan in place for when his playing days ended.
Collinsworth intended to become a lawyer.
While with the Bengals, owner and general manager Mike Brown allowed Collinsworth to miss meetings in the morning to attend classes. After law school, he’d join his Bengals teammates at practice.
“(Brown) said, ‘If you don’t know what Cover 2 is by now, you’re never going to know it.’ And he let me go,” Collinsworth said in a phone interview. “I had just gotten married. We were pregnant with our first child. And my wife was a lawyer. She was practicing and I was gonna practice, too. That was just what we were going to be. And I got a call from HBO to ask me if I wanted to work with the great Len Dawson and Nick Buoniconti (on ‘Inside the NFL’).
“I said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ and they said, ‘We want you to do features.’ I said, ‘How much is the pay?’ They said, ‘$50,000,’ and I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ I said, ‘Just one question: ‘What’s a feature?’ I had no idea what they’re talking about. But for $50,000, I was going to do whatever they wanted me to do.”
After doing features for “Inside the NFL” in 1989, Collinsworth joined Dawson and Buoniconti in the studio. That trio stayed together through the 2001 season.
Collinsworth has great memories of working with Dawson, the former Chiefs quarterback and broadcaster who died earlier this year at the age of 87.
“He’s just about the only perfect human being I ever met. He never got flustered,” Collinsworth recalled. “He never made a mistake. If he did make a mistake, he never stopped to want to do it over again. We were a taped show back then. He just didn’t care. ...
“If you knew Lenny at all, he was just like completely, totally unflappable, and no matter how many arguments or fights Nick Buoniconti and I got into, he would just sit back like he was our grandfather and laugh at us and go, ‘Now boys.’ You know one of those. He just always made even the worst of times really fun. If he ever said a bad word about anybody, I never heard it. He just was the best. He was as lovely a man as you could ever meet.”
Collinsworth joined NBC in 1990, working as a studio analyst. After a stint with Fox that included time as a game analyst, Collinsworth took over after John Madden left his role as a Sunday Night Football analyst on NBC in 2009.
Now in his 14th season on Sunday Night Football, Collinsworth will call the Chiefs-Chargers game this weekend.
“I’m always excited to see the Kansas City Chiefs and the Chargers and that good young quarterback play,” Collinsworth said. “It’s just good to see two of the young stars going at it. And you know they each have their own little gifts. It’ll be great.”
This story was originally published November 18, 2022 at 9:01 AM.
