For the first time since 1987, a woman reportedly will call play-by-play on an NFL regular-season game.
Beth Mowins will do the honors on the second game of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” season-opening doubleheader Sept. 11, according to Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated. Mowins would be the first woman to call play-by-play since Gayle Sierens broadcast a Seattle Seahawks-Kansas City Chiefs game for NBC on Dec. 27, 1987. ESPN had no comment on the SI report.
Mowins, who has called college football games and preseason Oakland Raiders games, will “likely” be joined by Rex Ryan, Deitsch adds, on the Los Angeles Chargers-Denver Broncos game that will follow the New Orleans Saints-Minnesota Vikings game with Sean McDonough and Jon Gruden. Ryan was hired by ESPN in March after being fired as the Buffalo Bills coach over the winter and the “MNF” game would be his regular-season debut as a color commentator. The two broadcast the Florida State spring game together in April. Ryan also will appear on ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown.”
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“Beth will show up and do a game and do as good a job as any of the men,” Mike Tirico, the longtime ESPN “MNF” broadcast who now is with NBC Sports, told Deitsch’s SI Media Podcast in January. “She is a ceiling-breaker, a pioneer and there will be more women going forward.”
Unlike other networks, ESPN has helped lead the way, assigning Doris Burke, Kara Lawson, Jessica Mendoza, Mowins and others to games.
As for Sierens, she retired from Tampa’s WFLA in 2015 and, despite receiving favorable reviews for the 1987 broadcast, never called another NFL game. Although she was offered six more games in the 1988 season, the opportunity was a poor fit personally and professionally. Sierens had just gotten married and was three months pregnant and faced balancing six weekends on the road with her regular job in Tampa. “You’d be getting a great job; unprecedented for a female,” her co-anchor, Bob Hite, recalled telling her in a Tampa Bay Times interview. “On the other hand, you’d be giving up a lot.”
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For Sierens, it was enough just to have excelled at an assignment she prepared for alongside Marty Glickman, the legendary broadcaster. Still, the pressure was intense. “I don’t have to be good,” she told the St. Petersburg Times just before the game, “I have to be terrific, better than the best, if that’s possible. Yes, just because I’m a woman.”
She was and, along the way, she became more than just the answer to a trivia question. As Erin Andrews put it, she became an inspiration. She admitted in the 2015 Tampa Bay Times interviews that she did have some “what-ifs.” If she’d taken the opportunity, would it have taken less time for other women to get a chance in the booth?
“I don’t know why a woman hasn’t been able to break into that,” she says. “It’s sad for me. It’s sad that it didn’t happen sooner. I hope that my performance was good enough that it merited other women being given the chance. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe everybody thought it was fun and cute and a great idea, but that’s not really how we want to hear our games. I don’t know. I may never know the answer to that. But I surely hope that someone soon gets an opportunity.”
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