This is expected to be NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya’s final season in that role for Sunday Night Football games on NBC, but the network has not definitively said whether or not that was the case.
Tafoya has been absent from a few of the primetime telecasts recently. While some say she’s being punished for comments she made about former quarterback Colin Kaepernick on the Nov. 3 edition of ABC’s The View, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports an NBC spokesperson told them the absences were arranged before the season started.
“As we have done repeatedly, we’re again giving our announcers bye weeks in 2021, and we plan to do it well into the future,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying to the Inquirer. “Michele’s off weeks — which were determined prior to the season — were all in cold weather cities after Thanksgiving, and her final weekend off this season comes on Jan. 2 in Green Bay. Any other speculation about her time off is blatantly false.”
Tafoya made it clear in a discussion with the ABC talk show co-hosts that Kaepernick was no longer in the NFL because he no longer possessed the talent to be on a roster. She said Kaepernick has actually benefitted greatly since leaving the league, as evidenced by his Netflix series and Nike endorsement deal. She added that a planned open tryout in 2019 in front of NFL scouts ended up being moved by him and his entourage last-minute, and fewer scouts actually got to see the former San Francisco 49er work out. So that hindered his chances to get back to playing football also.
The counterpoint was made that Kaepernick was being made to sign an agreement he didn’t want to sign prior to the tryout, and that’s why it got moved. Tafoya then responded that ultimately the main reason he’s no longer being considered for quarterback jobs is not due to his stances on police, his kneeling protest during the National Anthem, or that the NFL as a whole is racist.
“I just want to give the benefit of the doubt to some people that there are two sides to this story,” she said. “I think all of us can agree that there is a lot to this story we still don’t know.”
That elicited groans from the live studio audience, to which Tafoya encouraged them to “Bring it on.”
Tafoya is not afraid to let her political views be known, and in the era of cancel culture, it makes sense that some would think that her thoughts, which many on one side of the political aisle would find controversial, being shared would result in some kind of reprimand by NBC in the form of missed time from game coverage.
Seems like Tafoya’s future at NBC will become official in due time. The network will have coverage of the Super Bowl this season, and Tafoya is expected to be a part of the broadcast team. According to Andrew Marchand, that will be the end of her time on NFL sidelines.
