Cris Collinsworth’s well-known easy “slide” within the NBC broadcast sales space was truly born out of necessity.
Collinsworth has since retired the transfer however it was a subject introduced up by Eli Manning on ESPN’s “ManningCast” throughout Cowboys-Bengals on Monday evening.
Reacting to the previous Giants quarterback’s deadpan introduction, Collinsworth revealed he began doing the slide into the display screen as a result of Al Michaels had a contractual stipulation that NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” would start with the legendary play-by-play broadcaster alone on-screen.
“You know how that all got started, right? So Al’s got it in his contract that he’s the only one on camera for the first minute of the broadcast,” Collinsworth stated.
“I don’t care! It’s less I got to try and remember. I’m happy about it. I got no problem at all.”
Collinsworth then went over the mechanics of the way it labored.
“So they would say, ‘Alright, Cris, Al’s gotta be the only one on. You gotta get out of the shot,’” Collinsworth stated.
“I was like, ‘Well you put a piece of tape down for my legs to be on either side to do it. What do you want me to do, have my legs around this piece of tape? Or do you want me to get out of the shot?’ [The producer] goes, ‘Well, just lean out of the shot. Just lean out!’ So I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Collinsworth defined with an illustrative gesture that he would get out of the shot by mendacity on a desk off-screen “while Al’s waxing poetic on the other side, and then he goes to his partner, ‘Come on in.’”
Thus the slide was born.
Collinsworth nonetheless marvels over what a phenomenon it grew to become.
“This whole thing becomes a totally crazed sort of thing … and I don’t know what the heck happened, but it made me famous,” Collinsworth mused.
Talking with The Submit’s Justin Terranova in 2019, Michaels defined that Collinsworth’s slide could be extra correctly described as “angling in.”
Michaels and Collinsworth labored collectively on “SNF” for 13 years earlier than Michaels left for Amazon and Mike Tirico joined Collinsworth within the NBC sales space.
