Ahmed Fareed is very honest about not knowing everything.
Fareed, who currently serves as a host and reporter on various events and properties across NBC Sports, covers everything from horse racing to the Olympics and even some rugby. These are things that perhaps the Syracuse University graduate didn’t know about and wasn’t necessarily expected to cover.
Fareed is an honest and transparent analyst who doesn’t deceive his audience. He acknowledges his limitations and defers to other experts with better knowledge of the subject matter.
“I don’t want to ever try to fool anyone,” he told host Jessica Kleinschmidt on Awful Announcing’s Short and to the Point podcast. “There are certainly times up there…you don’t want to be up there talking about a Rugby World Cup and be like, ‘Hey, I just learned about rugby seven days ago.’ You don’t necessarily want to be that honest. But at the same time, you’ve got to be able to level with the viewer. I’ve always felt like I don’t want to feel like I’m up on TV, pulling wool over anyone’s faces, trying to be someone I’m not, trying to pretend that I know more than I do.
“That’s why we have the analysts. That’s why when I do the Kentucky Derby, I’m sitting next to Hall of Fame jockey Jerry Bailey — a Hall of Fame analyst, who has been covering the sport for 40-50 years. So, I don’t need to be that be that guy. And it’s funny, when I first started out, that’s what NBC wanted most from me. They go, ‘Don’t be that guy. Don’t try to dazzle us with how much you learned over the last week reading the research packet. Ask the questions that people at home want to know the answer to. And if you can ask those and get that out of analyst and relate it to the common fan, because that’s who you are, then you’re doing your job.'”
Essentially, it’s Fareed’s job to ask insightful questions that the audience wants to know the answers to rather than trying to be an expert himself.
He told NBC that he could do that but acknowledged that there are also times when he isn’t granted grace from die-hard fans, who may not be forgiving of small mistakes. This is especially true if the error is made by someone considered an outsider to the sport.
“Certainly, there are times when you’re doing Premier League — which I’ve done in the last four years — and those are die-hard fans watching, and they don’t have a whole lot of patience for a mispronunciation, as well they shouldn’t, honestly,” said Fareed. I mean, it’s just like you should know this stuff. And so, it’s tough. You feel like you definitely have to be on your game, doing some of these sports that aren’t maybe the most popular sports out there, but you know that their fanbase loves the sport so much and is a die-hard and knows the ins and outs of it. And that’s when you really have to, again, lean on your analyst and be brave enough to say, ‘I don’t know this, can you explain this.’
“Maybe there are some people – even if they are die-hards and won’t admit it — they don’t understand exactly what the analysts are talking about either.”
It certainly seems like Fareed’s transparency and willingness to learn, rather than pretend to know everything, make him a relatable and trustworthy figure in the sports media landscape.
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