THE MODERATOR: Welcome, everybody, to the Monday Night Football conference call. My name is Derek Volner, for those who haven’t met me yet or communicated with me yet, from the ESPN PR team, and I’m joined here by Allie Stoneberg, who is my teammate on the ESPN PR team covering Monday Night Football and the NFL.
On the call today we have Stephanie Druley, ESPN’s executive vice president of event and studio production; and then we have our new Monday Night Football booth with Steve Levy, Louis Riddick and Brian Griese in the booth; and then joining us, as well, is Lisa Salters, who is now the longest tenured sideline reporter in Monday Night Football history.
We’re going to turn it over to each of them to give a little bit of an opening statement before we get to questions. We’ll start with Stephanie Druley. Stephanie, I turn it over to you.
STEPHANIE DRULEY: Morning, everybody. Thank you for joining. I will say it’s a little discombobulating to see so many boxes and see everybody, but it’s a good change of pace.
Again, thanks for joining. Look, we are really excited to start the 50th season of Monday Night Football this Monday with Steelers-Giants and Broncos-Titans. We have a veteran team but not veteran to Monday Night Football, but a team of veteran broadcasters who have firmly established themselves in the football world and are familiar to our fans, and we have what is undoubtedly the best schedule we’ve had in a really long time, not just this opening Monday but obviously when you look to Sept. 28 and the Chiefs and the Ravens, probably on paper one of the best games of the year. We are really excited about that.
For the first time, Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit will call one of our opening games. They will call the Steelers-Giants Monday night, and the team you’re about to meet will call our Titans-Broncos game.
Look, I am very enthusiastic about this group. There are not a lot of unknowns here. We have been working since the beginning of our — since before our announcement. We have a new producer this year joining our director Jimmy Platt, who is Phil Dean. Jimmy is in his second year directing. So, we really feel like we have a new team headed in a new direction, and we are very excited to get to the season.
With that, I think I’ve set a record for using the word “excited,” so I think you know how I feel. I’ll give it back to Derek and he can kick us around.
THE MODERATOR: We’ll start with Steve Levy and going to Louis Riddick and then Brian Griese and Lisa Salters.
STEVE LEVY: Thanks, Derek, and good morning, everybody. Thank you for your interest and appreciate you all being here. I woke up this morning, as I often do these days, and I pondered when I should deactivate my Twitter account, and I thought I would wait probably until maybe Monday or Tuesday. We’ll see how that goes. But I saw on Twitter this morning that today is the 45th anniversary of “Welcome Back Kotter,” and that certainly brought me back to my childhood, and I was 10 years old at that time, and it was a family favorite for us. I wanted to be John Travolta at that point, and that was around the same time that I began really falling in love with NFL football and started the negotiation process with my parents about staying up as late as possible to watch.
Those games of course started at 9:00 eastern, so it was a year of first quarter and then the next year maybe can we make it to halftime and then it was through halftime and the great highlights and Howard Cosell and the music and so on.
It’s been quite the journey. I’m obviously ecstatic. “Dream job” feels so cliche now, but I can’t come up with anything that summarizes it better for me personally. People who know me know I have said for many years that I’m the most fortunate guy in the business, and I felt that when I was anchoring the 11:00 SportsCenter, so you can imagine how I feel now being put in the Monday Night Football play-by-play chair.
I feel like our upper management has put us all in a position to succeed. Stephanie gave you the names, and I can’t tell you — even people I haven’t worked with, I have fully vetted and hear only great things.
So, I am excited to not talk about the process anymore. Obviously, we can do that here this morning, but I am excited for kickoff. Let’s kick the thing off and let’s play football and let’s have a good time doing it. That’s where I’m headed.
