Chris Berman never imagined ESPN getting the Super Bowl

Super Bowl LXI will be one of the biggest events in ESPN history, a history that Chris Berman has seen almost the entirety of.

Berman joined Pardon My Take this week for his annual pre-Super Bowl appearance ahead of the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots matching up this weekend in Santa Clara. And during the interview, Dan “Big Cat” Katz asked Berman to briefly look ahead to next year’s Super Bowl, which will air on ESPN and ABC, something that seemed nearly impossible in the network’s infancy.

“Chest will be out for all of us,” Berman boasted. “We never thought it. But then eight years in, we got the NFL, which was way ahead of the curve…we got the Pro Bowl, we treated that like the Super Bowl.”

“The only thing I can compare it to is when ESPN got the Rose Bowl. And I turn on the TV, and I’m home, ‘ESPN presents the Rose Bowl…’ Pretty proud moment for a lot of people whose names you’ll never know that helped put the mortar and brick that allowed us to do this. You can never imagine this. Super Bowl? We’re gonna have the Super Bowl? Pretty cool,” Berman continued. “Now, I’m sure we’ll do plenty associated with it. You’ll be, hopefully not sick of us by the time we get to September. Pretty cool.”

Pretty cool especially for someone like Berman, who has been a face of the network and its NFL coverage since the beginning. Berman joined ESPN as a SportsCenter anchor in 1979, one month after the all-sports network launched. And nearly a half-century later, Berman is still involved at the network and will undoubtedly have a roll in its Super Bowl coverage next year.

2027 will be ABC’s first Super Bowl broadcast since 2006, and it will be the first-ever Super Bowl for ESPN, a day that Joe Buck has claimed will be the “biggest” in their history. And that’s no exaggeration. When the Worldwide Leader in Sports gets to host the biggest sporting event in American sports, it undoubtedly will be a historic occasion for the brand.