Sundays will find Sean McManus on “The NFL Today” set with Phil Simms, James Brown, Bill Cowher, Nate Burleson and Boomer Esiason. Jesse Ward
First, let’s address the elephant in the room.
Sean McManus is not retiring.
Every couple of years, this rumor gains traction. It happened in the run-up to Super Bowl 50 nearly six years ago. What better way to cap off a legendary sports media career than to executive produce the NFL’s 50th Super Bowl?
It’s happening again this year, as the 66-year-old executive who essentially saved CBS Sports marks a career milestone. He has overseen one of the most enduring sports brands for a quarter of a century.
After spending 25 years heading up CBS Sports, McManus obviously is closer to the end of his career there than the beginning.
But McManus, one of the most respected executives in all of sports, is no closer to retiring today than he was five years ago.
Why would he?
He is among the most respected executives in sports media. League and conference executives consistently use words like “class” and “integrity” when they talk about him.
“What would I do that would be more fun than this?” McManus asked. “Assuming I still have my fastball, I don’t see retirement being on the horizon at all right now.”
The truth is that McManus has a job that any football fan would want — he watches every NFL game with a direct line to the executive producer. “I’m getting paid for doing something that most people would do for free,” he said.
Take the NFL’s Week 7, for example. CBS picked Kansas City-Tennessee as its main early game, going to 65% of the country. The problem: The game turned into a rout in the first half when the Titans took a 27-0 halftime lead. To make matters worse, Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes, a reliable television ratings draw, played miserably.
Sitting in his customary seat in the front row of a viewing room at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, McManus calmly picked up the phone during the first half and called executive producer Harold Bryant, who was down the hall in a production room. McManus wanted to incorporate more of Mahomes’ reaction shots into the telecast.
McManus tries to keep from offering these kinds of suggestions too frequently. But when he does make such a call, his team responds.
Almost immediately, the Chiefs-Titans telecast started cutting to sideline shots of Mahomes after the Titans made a big play on offense. The reaction shots made for good television, as Mahomes’ facial expressions showed his discouragement at how the game was progressing.
Later in the third quarter, when it became obvious that the Chiefs weren’t going to come back, McManus huddled with Dan Weinberg, executive vice president of programming, to determine when to switch out of the game into a more competitive one.
What fan wouldn’t want that kind of influence on how America’s most popular sport is shown on television?
Trailed by a reporter throughout the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City that Sunday, it was easy to see why McManus has no plans to leave his job. He is still energized by NFL Sundays.
Two hours before the 1 p.m. kickoffs, McManus made the rounds, chatting amiably with everyone from on-air talent to behind-the-scenes staffers at both CBS Sports Network and the broadcast studio.
He stopped by the set for “That Other Pregame Show” on CBS Sports Network first, casually making small talk with people in the studio. He made a point of offering encouragement to former Chicago Bear Brock Vereen, who was working his debut episode as an analyst.
From there, McManus moved to “The NFL Today,” set where he spoke with the on-air crew who know the CBS executive best. He bantered with Phil Simms over their respective haircuts, causing show host James Brown to shake his head and chuckle, “How can you talk to the boss man about topics like that?”
“It’s one of the most enjoyable and invigorating parts of my job, to be in the studio for NFL,” McManus said.
McManus and former CBS Chairman and CEO Michael Jordan celebrate the deal in 1998 that would return the NFL to CBS.getty images
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It’s not an overstatement to say that McManus saved CBS Sports when he was hired in 1996 to replace David Kenin.
The problem at the time was that CBS Sports didn’t actually have a lot of sports. In the years before he joined, CBS lost rights to the NBA (which went to NBC), MLB (which went to ABC and NBC), the Olympics (which went to NBC) and, most importantly, the NFL (which went to Fox).
Before taking the job, McManus made sure that the network’s then-owner, Westinghouse, would support his plans to rebuild CBS’s sports department. Westinghouse executives assured him that they would.
McManus’ first order of business back in 1996 was to up the quality of CBS Sports productions, so he brought in a new executive producer in Terry Ewert and hired on-air talent like Greg Gumbel, Dick Enberg and a young Ian Eagle.
But McManus also needed to make sure that the relationships CBS Sports had with rights holders were rock solid, which has become a consistent theme through his 25-year career. He brought in Tony Petitti as his No. 2 executive to help build the network.
In those early days, McManus spent a lot of time with Augusta National, the NCAA, the PGA Tour and the PGA of America.
But McManus’ main ambition was to regain NFL rights for CBS, so he developed strong relationships with Bob Tisch, who owned the New York Giants at the time, then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and future NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. He met regularly with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft to let them know that CBS was going to be a serious player when the negotiations started.
“In the back of my mind, every single day was figuring out a way to get the NFL back,” McManus said.
CBS ended up picking up the AFC package from NBC in 1998, paying an average of $500 million per year, which doubled the rights fee NBC was paying at the time. Despite the exorbitant cost, which seems like a quaint price by today’s standards, CBS made a profit on the deal, McManus said.
McManus and Tagliabue signed the deal the Monday after the Jets-Broncos AFC Championship game, which led to a lot of celebration in CBS’s offices. A staffer brought six bottles of champagne into a CBS conference room, and McManus said every one of those bottles was opened.
“I’ve never felt the kind of professional elation I felt when I signed that deal,” he said. “When I started telling people that we had gotten the NFL back, you could literally hear people screaming in hallways, running into my office, hugging. It was like they all had just won the Mega Millions lottery.”
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CBS Sports in 1998, when McManus cut the NFL deal, bears little resemblance to the CBS Sports of 2021, when McManus cut a $2 billion-per-year deal for the NFL.
Take that NFL Sunday on Oct. 24, for example. The viewing room where McManus and his team sit is outfitted with 15 screens filled with NFL action. That day, however, one of the screens was devoted to an Italian soccer match between Inter Milan and Juventus.
McManus is shown with Jim Nantz at the 1997 Final Four in Indianapolis, the first for McManus after joining CBS Sports.CBS Sports
It would have been unthinkable to have a European soccer match take up one of those screens back in 1998. Heck, it would have been unlikely in 2018, too. But the match, which was on the Paramount+ streaming service, shows how McManus and his team have adapted with the changing sports media environment.
Relationships still are as important as ever. So, too, are high-quality productions. But alongside his trusted lieutenant, David Berson, McManus has steered CBS through the rise of video streaming that has changed the business in myriad ways.
When McManus started, CBS was just a broadcast network. Now, CBS has cable channels, websites and a streaming service, all of which need sports programming to thrive.
The change has caused McManus to view sports properties differently. In 1996, it was easy to figure out the value of a sports property. Network executives would have to calculate how much they could generate in sales and subtract how much they would have to pay for production.
Eventually, that model became more complicated as rights valuations included cable affiliate and retransmission consent fees.
Today, an extra emphasis has been put on adding and retaining streaming subscribers. With Paramount+ in play, CBS can afford to pay more in rights.
The bottom line is that live sports rights have become even more valuable in this new media environment.
The 2019 Viacom-CBS merger added even more platforms that McManus could exploit during rights negotiations. Nickelodeon, for example, has carried much-praised, kid-focused NFL productions.
And the addition of the Paramount+ streaming service forced McManus to get involved in soccer rights for the first time in his career, cutting deals for the UEFA Champions League, Concacaf and Serie A. Overall, CBS has signed 10 deals for international soccer properties, all of which include streaming components.
“It’s made the business more complicated,” McManus said. “It’s given us new opportunities, with properties like Champions League and Serie A, that we couldn’t have afforded to acquire without direct-to-consumer revenue.”
The change also has increased CBS Sports’ workload dramatically. It will carry 2,000 games a year, complete with a studio show for many of those games. In the month of October, CBS Sports produced studio shows 26 out of the 30 days.
“Everything we look at in the future will have a component that relates to direct-to-consumer,” McManus said. “Whether that’s the driving force, as it was, with Champions League negotiations, or whether it’s incremental to our linear distribution, it’s here to stay and is going to be an increasingly more important priority for CBS Sports.”
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McManus appears as energized as ever about the business he runs.
He is especially proud of the team he has assembled, which includes Berson, CBS Sports president, an executive he hired 11 years ago as his second-in-command and eventual successor. The two have an extraordinarily close relationship, both personally and professionally.
“Our whole team is close-knit and collaborative,” McManus said. “We have no politics. We have no pride of authorship.”
He also is invigorated about figuring out the best ways to compete in a changing media business that he expects will lead to a few more wins in an already hall of fame-worthy career.
“We have a lot of challenges in front of us, but we’re going to continue to be aggressive,” McManus said. “It’s a challenging, but incredibly enjoyable job.”
