After 15 years of hosting NFL Live, Trey Wingo is leaving the daily football talk show he helped build to partner with Mike Golic on the new Golic and Wingo radio talk show. On Thursday, ESPN sent him out in style.
With minutes left in Wingo’s final NFL Live show, the host began to say something about Nick Foles and unlikely Super Bowl quarterbacks when he was interrupted by colleague Tedy Bruschi. Bruschi then introduced a video in which former NFL Live analysts Herm Edwards and Mark Schlereth thanked Wingo for his contributions to the show.
“You are the sensei,” Schlereth said. “You’ve mentored me, you’ve mentored everybody on the show, and some of the best days of my entire life have been spent on set with you.”
Those testimonials turned out to be an appetizer to a three-and-a-half-minute montage of Wingo’s greatest hits on NFL Live, beginning with the first open in the show’s history back in 2002. When that tribute ended, Wingo closed his last NFL Live with some words of his own.
“I’m looking forward to my new adventure, but the best job I ever had was doing this job for 15 years,” he said before rattling off names of people he had worked beside.
Here’s the entire six-minute segment:
Thank you, @wingoz. pic.twitter.com/iVmAXi62Kw
— NFL on ESPN (@ESPNNFL) February 1, 2018
Wingo’s involvement with NFL Live dates all the way back to 1998, when the show was founded as NFL 2Night. It switched names in 2002, and Wingo has remained its face ever since, even as several dozen analysts shuffled in and out.
Wingo is already more than two months into his stint on Golic and Wingo, where he has replaced Mike Greenberg on ESPN’s marquee radio program, but he closed out the football season on NFL Live anyway. ESPN announced in August that Wendi Nix would replace Wingo on NFL Live.
