The Thanksgiving night game on NBC will blur the lines between Football Night in America and Sunday Night Football. Mike Tirico, Tony Dungy, and Rodney Harrison will be in the booth for the Falcons-Saints game.
Tirico, one of the finest play-by play voices in all of sports, has done many games. Dungy has been in the booth before, too. For Harrison, it’s all new. Here’s a prediction: Rodney will be great.
“This is definitely unfamiliar territory for me,” Harrison recently told Barry Wilner of the Associated Press. “I’m trying to figure what I want to talk about, how I want to focus on the offense or the defense. Mike [Tirico] tells me just to talk about what you see, that my being on the field and in the locker room as a player, just talk about what you feel like you want to talk about and have fun. . . . I am not going to try to be Cris Collinsworth or Troy Aikman. I will trust my instincts.”
Rodney’s instincts are telling him to say less, not more.
“One of the things I am focusing, there are many announcers who think they have to talk about every single thing they see on every single play,” Harrison said. “That’s one of the things that really irks me when I watch a game. I promise I will not be that guy. There will be no one saying, ‘Shut the hell up Rodney, I am tired of listening to you.’ That will not happen.”
“I think Rodney really will give some insight they do not really get elsewhere,” Dungy told Wilner. “Especially in a game like this, which will be so much of an aerial attack and passing. So, what should and can be done on defense to counteract it? In that area, I think we will both have good things to say.”
Harrison has always provided clear, blunt, and insightful opinions on Football Night in America. Check out the video attached to this post, where Rodney said (to Dungy’s dismay) that Rodney would never hire a defensive coordinator to be a head coach in today’s NFL.