Chasing an ambulance through three red lights while a backup cop beat a reporter, Rich Eisen had an epiphany.
“Right now I’m nothing more than an ambulance rusher and I should probably try to buckle down and follow the dream,” Eisen recalled in an interview with Wealth.
Eisen was once a crime reporter, but is now a celebrity sportscaster and podcaster with his own brand to back it up. In 2022, Emmy-nominated “The Rich Eisen Show” made the jump from NBCUniversal’s Peacock to Yearcementing its popularity among sports and entertainment fans.
After breaking free from major sports networks like ESPN and NFL Network, Eisen forged his own path and turned sports broadcasting on its head. “The Rich Eisen Show” combines two popular interests – sports and entertainment – balancing the power rankings of professional sports leagues with unexpected guests like Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Mila Kunis and even vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.
But it took some time for Eisen to develop his own vision and his own brand—and become a six-time Sports Emmy nominee in the Outstanding Studio Executive category.
The early days of Eisen
Born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, Eisen had always loved sports — but realized it was better suited to the sidelines.
“I couldn’t hit a curveball, I really didn’t have a noticeable jump, so to get to a certain point in the sports world, I probably had to talk about that more than anything else,” he said. .
Eisen grew up emulating sports broadcasts, calling the action street games. By the time he got to the University of Michigan, where he wrote for the student newspaper, he knew he wanted to be a sportscaster, late-night talk show host or talk show host. Any of those careers would make him happy.
After graduation, Eisen worked for a newspaper in his hometown, Advance Staten Islandabout two years before he had an epiphany behind the wheel of a car chasing an ambulance. At that point, he decided to pursue a sports broadcasting dream instead. He went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, “which means I’m one degree short of becoming a TV doctor, if I can get a Ph.D. one day,” Eisen said.
Breakthrough into sports
After graduating from Northwestern, Eisen landed a summer internship at CBS Evening News during the summer of the OJ Simpson preliminary trial in the mid-90s. He then landed a job broadcasting sports events for the local ABC affiliate in Redding, Calif., before deciding in 1995 that it was time to send his column and resume to headhunters. ESPN noticed him and hired him on SportsCenter, the company’s flagship program, at the age of 26.
“And I left,” he said. “I felt like I won the lottery.”
Eisen began working for ESPN during what was considered the network’s golden era between 1996 and 2003, “when the Internet hadn’t yet taken over,” he said. Eisen worked on the 2 a.m. show with fellow sportswriter Stuart Scott, who died of appendicitis cancer in 2015—but despite the early morning hours, Eisen said it was the most exposure of his entire career, appearing in more than 100 million homes, because ESPN re-aired its show seven times every morning.
“Today I’m going to have people come up to me in airports with their kids saying they’re going to watch me and Stu in the morning and then take the school bus to school,” Eisen said. “I’m blessed to have had that monster early in my career and to be chosen by ESPN to help bring the fight to a time slot that was just starting to become extremely popular.”
Eisen left ESPN in 2003 to plant his flag at NFL Network, but he still loves his time at the Disney sports behemoth.
Getty Images—Cooper Neill
“People still hum the SportsCenter theme to me as I walk through airports. I love it,” Eisen said. “I love having that part of my career. I met my wife there in the newsroom there. My three kids are technically ESPN babies. It changed my life.”
Eisen’s wife, Suzy Shuster, is also a sports commentator who hosts her own podcast, “What Football” with former Las Vegas Raiders CEO Amy Trask.
Building your own brand
It’s one thing to break into sports broadcasting; building your own brand and show is a whole other beast. But Eisen did both.
While he was the first on-air talent added to the NFL Network’s roster in June 2003—five months before the network’s launch in November 2003, according to NFL— Eisen had another epiphany a few years later.
“Following the Super Bowl, I realized that the biggest export that we have in terms of sports in North America, and the biggest event that we have, the Super Bowl, was stopped in the middle of a rock concert,” he said. “And nobody really bats an eye at it. In fact, more people will be talking about half-time than the actual game, depending on how the game goes.”
This made Eisen realize the NFL is pop culture, just like movies, television shows, books and music albums.
“Why not build a show around that?” Eisen wondered.
About halfway through his tenure at the NFL Network, Eisen started his own podcast, which eventually turned into a TV show, interviewing celebrities, movie stars, television stars and musicians. From there, Eisen got a call from DirecTV in 2013 asking him to do his podcast as a television and radio simulcast after “The Dan Patrick Show” on the Audience Network.
Eisen agreed to the idea and eventually accepted the NFL Network. He developed the series for about five years — but then the Audience Network suddenly shut down, which meant “The Rich Eisen Show” needed a new home.
“I got the news two days before Christmas 2019. I’ll never forget it,” Eisen said. “I was faced with the reality: I was either going to take it over, figure out how to own it, manage it and host it, or I was going to lose it. And losing was not an option.
“I didn’t want this show to end that way. It’s not the way I imagined it would end,” Eisen said. “I don’t think he deserved such an end.”
Fortunately, Eisen had a team behind him, he said, including his agents, media relations team and producers, but it was still a difficult adjustment from a major network to building his own brand with his own staff — as long as the pandemic was just started.
“Suddenly I went from television and radio simulcasts watched by millions of homes and heard on over 100 radio stations to simply using Sirius XM and YouTubeEisen said. “Man, it was a very troubled time where life was crazy, just in general and then professionally, just figuring out how to own this.”
But Eisen persisted: it eventually struck a deal with Peacock before switching to Roku in 2022, which had 63.1 million active accounts in the second quarter of this year.
Eisen is “the real deal”, Charlie Collierpresident of Roku media, said Wealth. “He is an all-star talent. He’s funny. He has a huge knowledge base—not only about sports, but also about popular culture. And he’s one of those people who is so passionate about everything he does.”
The future of Rich Eisen
Eisen says he’s more than “made it” — he’s “living his childhood dream.”
“I wanted to be a sports announcer or a talk show host, both of which I do every day in a studio with my name and logo,” he said. He celebrated 10 years of “The Rich Eisen Show” in October.
Eisen has also embraced social media to promote his show. Although he never imagined becoming a YouTube or TikTok influencer, his YouTube page currently has 850,000 subscribers and he has amassed 250,000 followers on TikTok.
“I love when people stop me and say, ‘I watch your show on TikTok every day,’ and it’s like, wow, those are words I never thought I’d hear,” Eisen said. “I’m delighted to hear that, because in this day and age you obviously want to have a live show and you obviously want to have an audience watching you on demand.”
Although Eisen has achieved many of his dreams, he still has his eye on a few dream roles. A longtime fan of Bob Barker and “The Price is Right,” Eisen could be seen as a game show host. Eisen even met Barker once and told him “I grew up watching him, and in college I would occasionally drop a class watching him.”
“As someone who makes a living talking to people as a television host, I emulate (Barker’s) style,” Eisen said.
Eisen said he also wants to host a dog show one day. (She has two rescue golden retrievers, Halo and Dylan.)
“I think I was sixth in the house compared to my wife. There are three children and two dogs, and I am the sixth,” said Eisen. “But I understand that. I understand my destiny in life. I love it.”
