Ranking his own personal top 20 Super Bowl moments might be the hardest assignment Chris Berman has given himself in nearly five decades at ESPN.
The 71-year-old is debuting “Chris Berman’s Super Bowl Top 20,” a new weekly series counting down his personal favorite Super Bowl plays, calls, and moments, as Front Office Sports first reported. The pre-packaged segments, running 90 seconds to two minutes, will premiere on NFL Live ahead of each Monday Night Football broadcast and re-air throughout the week, building toward Berman’s No. 1 pick during the playoffs in January, just before ESPN’s telecast of Super Bowl LXI on Feb. 14, 2027.
“It’s like trying to play a trifecta at the track,” he told FOS, adding that he’s already shot the first few segments and locked in his top three or four choices, but is still agonizing over the order.
Back in 1999, ahead of Super Bowl XXXIV, ESPN.com ran a fan poll built off a list of 20 personal Super Bowl favorites that Berman himself curated from Max McGee’s one-handed touchdown grab in Super Bowl I to John Elway’s gravity-defying helicopter spin in Super Bowl XXXII. Fans whittled the 20 down to a final 10, and Berman unveiled his own personal top 10 against the crowdsourced results live on that year’s pregame show. Twenty-six years later, he’s doing it again, except now the pool includes David Tyree’s helmet catch, Malcolm Butler’s interception, and every Super Bowl played since XXXIV.
An ESPN lifer, Berman joined the 24-hour sports startup one month after it launched in 1979, becoming the face of the network during its seminal years. At 71, Berman isn’t as active at ESPN as he once was, but he continues to host a streaming version of NFL Primetime on ESPN+ and, as the Top 20 countdown confirms, he’s playing a starring role in the network’s Super Bowl coverage this season. Recently, Berman expressed a desire to remain with ESPN until 2029, seeking to mark 50 years with the network.
The network announced its “Year of the Super Bowl” campaign back in February, kicking things off with “The Handoff,” a 24-hour event that ran from SoFi Stadium to Disneyland which saw Berman symbolically pass hosting duties to Scott Van Pelt. Since then, the campaign has rolled out Jeremy Schaap’s weekly podcast, The Biggest Game, which opened with Berman as its first guest, and I Scored a Touchdown, a series spotlighting players who reached the end zone from each of the 61 prior Super Bowls.
With everything old being new again, and audiences pining for the Chris Berman’s of the world like never before, ESPN seems happy to oblige, as “Boomer” gets a starring role in the buildup to the biggest broadcast of the network’s history.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.