Steve Kornacki is now appearing weekly on Football Night in America, contributing sports betting segments and highlights of games still in progress while the show is on air, Awful Announcing has learned.
His usual playoff tiebreaker breakdowns will still be layered in once the postseason picture takes shape.
The expanded role builds on the deal Kornacki signed with NBC News and NBC Sports last year, when Comcast split MSNBC off into its own company (Versant), and Kornacki chose to stay on the broadcast side rather than follow his longtime “big board” segment to the spinoff. That decision kept him anchored to NBC’s flagship political coverage — Meet the Press, Today, NBC Nightly News — while also preserving, and evidently growing, his footprint across the network’s sports division.
While the 45-year-old Kornacki is best known for his political data analysis — which he’ll continue at NBC News — he’s also built a following in the sports world in recent years thanks to his breakdowns of the NFL playoff picture. Since 2020, the Boston University alum has been a late-season staple of NBC’s Football Night in America, dissecting who’s in, who’s out, and who needs what to happen as if the NFL standings were an election map.
Beyond his late-season NFL coverage, Kornacki has also contributed to NBC’s presentation of Triple Crown horse races and the Olympics, providing his signature statistical analysis, typically on betting odds and medal counts. In 2021, he correctly picked Medina Spirit as the winner of the Kentucky Derby at 12-to-1 odds, a hefty payout for anyone who tailed the data guru.
Kornacki’s expanded role is part of a larger changing of the guard for FNIA this season, including the arrival of Mike Tomlin and the departure of Tony Dungy, Rodney Harrison, Chris Simms, Matthew Berry, and Jac Collinsworth.
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.