Behind the scenes of NBC Sports’ Kevin Kisner hire

The courtship between NBC Sports and the network’s newest lead golf analyst, Kevin Kisner, started in December 2023, but it took more than nine months before anyone dared to define the relationship.

Now in late September, it was time, at long last, for a hometown visit. As golf season bled into football, a convoy of NBC Sports brass including golf head honcho Sam Flood, president Rick Cordella and executive producer Tommy Roy made plans to visit Kisner at his permanent home in Aiken, S.C. The goal? To pitch Kisner on taking his broadcasting talents full-time. After nine months of tiptoeing around their interest — Kisner insisted on playing out the remainder of his pro career before leaving for TV, while NBC dished lead analyst duties at the U.S. Open and Open Championship to Brandel Chamblee and Luke Donald — NBC was ready to go all-in.

A full-time commitment wasn’t on anyone’s mind for too long in the months preceding September. Not after NBC announced Kisner as temporary lead analyst for a handful of big-time PGA Tour events (The Sentry, WM Phoenix Open, and Players) filling in for Paul Azinger. Not after Kisner impressed NBC Sports brass with his performance, balancing his knowledge of the pro game with his rib-cutting sense of humor. And not even after Kisner enjoyed the experience enough to sign on for NBC’s coverage of the season-ending FedEx Cup Playoff events, a three-week trial run that would closely mirror life in the full-time gig.

The truth is that neither party was ready for the next step. Kisner’s two years of remaining PGA Tour eligibility meant he wasn’t in the place to take the NBC job for most of 2024, and NBC was weary of the risks posed by hiring a TV neophyte while its broadcast underwent a broader editorial reimagining under Flood. It would have been convenient for Kisner to fill Azinger’s vacated lead analyst seat immediately, avoiding staffing headaches with the U.S. Open and Open Championship broadcasts and confusion from the golf world. NBC preferred this path enough to explore adding a full-time analyst in early ’24, but the job’s prestige and multimillion-dollar investment demanded a home-run swing. The network, perhaps scarred from the end of Azinger’s tenure, decided it was best to wait for the right pitch.

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Flood, Cordella and Roy arrived in Aiken in the fall to find Kisner feeling open-minded. The clock was ticking on the 40-year-old pro, who now had just one year remaining of PGA Tour eligibility courtesy of a lifetime top-50 earners exemption. He would get into a dozen or so Tour events in 2025, but would be mostly relegated to weaker-field events. If his play improved — unlikely for a player of Kisner’s age (40) and length (181st on Tour in 2024) — his playing schedule might fill, but that was uncertain. On the other hand, if his play kept with its recent trajectory, he would be available for most weeks of NBC’s PGA Tour coverage in 2025, and his playing career would be over in 2026.

In other words, if NBC was willing to work with him on the details, Kisner was open to taking the gig.

“I have a great relationship with Sam Flood. I like the way he talks about things. He’s very straight up, and that’s the way I am,” Kisner said. “My wife and I sat down with [Flood, Cordella and Roy] for three-and-a-half hours and just discussed life. We talked about the future — what we felt like was good, bad, how to make golf better, how they thought I could fit into their team.”

At the end of the conversation, the decision was made. Kisner would take on 10 events in 2025 and the permanent title of NBC Golf lead analyst while maintaining part-time PGA Tour playing privileges. If his playing career got in the way of the arrangement, NBC would be flexible, and if not, NBC would be the beneficiary.

“They’ll work with me in 2025,” Kisner said. “If something happens where I win and play great, they said, ‘that’s great.’ And I’ll play more golf. And if not, then I told them they have my full commitment in 2026.”

For NBC, Kisner was worth the gymnastics. Of all the analysts tested in ’24, Kisner had been the network’s top performer. He was the first outside selection for what became a rotating tryout in the lead chair throughout 2024, and the candidate whose performances in the booth drew the most buzz. On the weeks he joined the NBC team, Kisner enjoyed a lively rapport with play-by-play man (and buddy) Dan Hicks, made headlines for his colorful critiques, and seemed to grasp the finer points of analysis — amplify, clarify, explain — quickly.

“With all Tour players, I’m paying attention to how they handle press conferences and interviews, how they react with their caddies on the air,” Roy said. “I’m always trying to get a feeling about whether they’re a good communicator.”

“With Kevin, I started making attempts to talk to him on the range years ago. I would tell him, Hey, when the day comes that you’re ready to call it a wrap playing golf, I really think you have a chance to be in our business here, and successful at it.”

Even with Roy’s endorsement, Kisner’s entrance into the lead chair qualifies as an upset. The 40-year-old pro gives NBC something it hasn’t had in more than 30 years: a lead analyst who isn’t a major championship winner. That bucks decades of tradition in golf TV, where the prevailing sentiment has long been that lead analyst jobs are restricted only to those with major championship pedigree and a firsthand knowledge of history-altering moments.

There is a reasonable argument that the practice is outdated. Some of the biggest success stories in recent sports TV history have been players with less-than-historic statlines (Pat McAfee), while FOX’s $100 million contract with Tom Brady has shown that even all-time great players can struggle in the booth. Said differently, an analyst’s background means nothing if their insight isn’t interesting or informative.

“I want the 12-handicap at the club or on his couch to go, yeah, he was right about that, I’m going to try that, or, that’s exactly what happened,” said Kisner, who is expected to call the U.S. Open, Open Championship and Ryder Cup for NBC in 2025. “And then I want Scottie Scheffler or Max Homa or Brian Harman to go, Yeah, I did pull the heck out of that putt. Or, yeah, I made a terrible swing in that position. I want everybody to say, that’s exactly what happened. That’s why I’m sitting in that seat.”

Criticism is an art form in the lead analyst’s chair, where the subjects of criticism often watch closely. It helped NBC’s confidence to know Kisner had a net in the biggest moments. By the time Kisner signed his contract, the network had already decided to bring back a big broadcast experiment from 2024, the “odd-even” format, splitting play-by-play and analyst duties between teams designated to odd and even-numbered holes. The goal of the strategy, Flood and Roy said, is to facilitate a conversation between broadcasters that fans can “eavesdrop” in on, rather than having broadcasters speak to the audience at home. NBC hopes the shift to “odd-even” will make life easier for Kisner as he switches to golf TV. It will simplify preparation, for example, and create fewer, more targeted speaking opportunities.

But Kisner isn’t worried about flying off the handle. Quite the opposite. The biggest problem facing the networks is making something entertaining, he says, and his biggest advantage is understanding how to bridge the divide between players leery of the media business and a sports economy that is an extension of it.

“I think there’s always been a narrative that there were two sides, right? The media and then the golfers. It was always like the golfers didn’t want to divulge too much, because they didn’t want the media to mess up or picture them in a bad light,” Kisner says. “The more I’ve been on both sides, the more I realize the partnership should never be greater than now. The media is the biggest immediate deal. The media rights deal for the PGA Tour is the biggest moneymaker they have, and the players need to understand that the better they make the product on TV, the more money they can play for, and the more money they can make.”

These are the cold realities of the sports business, and in the scores-obsessed world of the PGA Tour, Kisner’s grasp of the media’s importance has long made him an outlier. Good golfers earn paychecks, he recognizes, but wealthy golfers earn eyeballs. That understanding is what pushed him into YouTube and podcasting well before NBC came along, and it’s what will give him a second life in the second-biggest golf TV job in the world.

In Kisner’s telling, the simplest version of his new role at NBC is to serve as an emissary between golf’s two at-times conflicting camps: the players and the people. Many broadcasters have tried their hand at helping the people understand the players, but Kisner says he feels he could help the relationship work the other way, too.

“Hopefully these top players understand that I’m their buddy first. I’m never going to do anything to make them feel disrespected or hurt their brand. I’m there to tell the truth,” Kisner says. “I’m going to tell it just like I did when they’re sitting there with me in the locker room, and I’m also going to go play with them the next week, so I’m never going to make a controversial statement just to get clicks. I tell it like it is, man, and that’s what I’ve done my whole career. Ask any player, they know where they stand with me at all times, and that’s what I plan to do in the booth.”

Of course, the truth has many shades, but Kisner seems uniquely adept at managing discomfort surely heading his way. He’s funny in a way that hasn’t graced golf televisions since David Feherty, and he’s already dreaming up ways to turn the audience quickly into his corner, even if it means running afoul of the FCC.

“I’m trying to see if Tommy will let me do my on-camera with my shirt off,” Kisner says, referencing his now-infamous Presidents Cup bet with Max Homa. “Dan and I will go down to our skivvies, and introduce me to the world.”

He pauses just after he delivers the punchline, as if to hold for laughter.

It’s a showman’s touch, and that’s exactly the point.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com. To subscribe to GOLF’s media newsletter, click the link here.