Mike Tomlin coached in the NFL for 19 seasons and never once looked rattled on a sideline. It took him a few minutes in a television studio to get corrected on live air by his own host.
Tomlin made his first regular-season appearance as an NBC analyst during the Seahawks and Patriots broadcast, and while breaking down Seattle’s offense he kept referring to star receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba as “JNS.” The actual nickname, which the entire football-watching world has used for years, is JSN.
He did not do it once. He did it repeatedly, with total confidence, in the tone of a man who has never been wrong about a football detail in his life.
Maria Taylor eventually had enough and stepped in, joking that she was not going to let him do it again. Tomlin laughed, took the correction, and got back to the analysis. It was a good moment from both of them, and Taylor handled it exactly right by making it a bit instead of a gotcha.
Naturally, the internet treated it as a referendum on his entire broadcasting career. Fans were calling for NBC to fire him inside the first quarter of his first show. Others noted, unkindly, that it showed the same lack of attention to detail they claim he had as a coach.
Here is my take: this is a nothing story that happens to be funny, and the reaction says more about how people feel about Tomlin than about Tomlin’s TV future.
Scrambled letters in an abbreviation is the lowest-stakes mistake available on a broadcast. Tomlin was not wrong about any of the actual football he was describing. He got a three-letter shorthand backwards, which is the kind of thing every analyst in the business does on a weekly basis and most hosts politely let slide.
The difference is that Tomlin is new, and new analysts get graded on a curve that runs the wrong direction. Everything he does for the next two months will be compared against an imaginary version of himself who is perfect on camera. Nobody clears that bar, including people who have done this for 20 years.
What I actually saw was encouraging. He took the correction without getting defensive, laughed at himself in real time, and moved on without losing the thread of his point. That is a harder skill than it sounds like, and plenty of former coaches never develop it because they spent their careers in rooms where nobody corrected them.
The real question about Tomlin on television was never going to be his diction. It is whether a guy who spent 19 years guarding information will actually say anything revealing about other coaches and other teams. Candor is the whole job, and the jury is out on that.
Give him four or five weeks. If the worst thing people can point to is that he called JSN by a scrambled set of initials, NBC is going to be very happy with this hire.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
