Maria Taylor has had a wild couple of years. “You can’t make up the story lines that end up leading to my very first Super Bowl,” she says now, in her first full interview since the controversy that led her to leave her longtime perch at ESPN for NBC Sports.
The broadcaster has ambitious plans for her future, but she could use a clone right now. Taylor is not only cohosting the Super Bowl in Los Angeles this Sunday, but acting as one of the main faces of NBC’s 2022 Winter Olympics coverage—which means she’s been in constant head-spinning motion, jetting between her home in Atlanta, NBC Sports’ Stamford, Connecticut, Olympic headquarters, and Los Angeles, where she’s being fitted by Armani for her Super Bowl outfit.
The 34-year-old didn’t realize that she’d already checked off every box on her sports-journalism bucket list until her family pointed it out. “My mom said, ‘Okay, so you’ll have an NBA Finals, three college football national championships, a Summer Olympics, a Winter Olympics, and a Super Bowl before you’re 35,’” Taylor says. “And I was like, Let’s go!”
For some of us, the prospect of ad-libbing live in front of nearly 100 million viewers at the Super Bowl is equivalent to one of those naked-in-public nightmares. But after eight years at ESPN as a sideline reporter and increasingly prominent show host, Taylor sees live TV as her “sweet spot.” “You have to know your information inside and out, because a fan can literally just jump in front of you, or someone can scream something super crazy,” she says. “But I feel like I draw on the sideline reporter in me, where you’re in the middle of a huge game, the crowd’s going wild, you’re responding to coaches or players. That’s where I started my career, so I only ever knew the complete and total chaos of live television.”
Taylor combines the energy of the college athlete she once was (she played basketball and volleyball at the University of Georgia) with the poise of a well-trained politician. She laughs easily, something that has probably come in handy over the last year.
In July, The New York Times reported on a leaked recording that revealed Taylor’s white ESPN colleague Rachel Nichols had made comments in July 2020 suggesting that Taylor had been promoted to host of NBA Countdown during the finals because she is Black. After Taylor’s contract at ESPN expired last summer, she announced that she was making the leap to another high-profile gig at NBC. She hasn’t spoken about the experience since.
Even now, she says, “I’m not terribly interested in going in on where that left me or what happened during that. But I do feel like everything that I’ve learned over the course of my career, whether it was on camera or behind the camera, has most certainly made me the woman that I am today. All it’s done is strengthen my beliefs. All it’s done is made me want to get to my goals without ever sacrificing my integrity.”
When I ask if she’s spoken to Nichols since, Taylor firmly says no. “I don’t want to talk about her.”
Nichols’s comments were made in July 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests exploded across the country. Just the month before, Taylor had engaged publicly with the controversy over New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees and his stance against players who protest during the national anthem. “If [George Floyd’s killing] didn’t affect you and make you want to reassess the way that you’re gonna address a question that includes racial injustice in our country—after you watch that man die in the middle of the street—something’s off,” Taylor said, noting that, while he had apologized for his remarks, Brees’s lack of empathy and education was problematic “when 70% of your league is African American and these are the conversations that you should have had.”