Salary: $1.5 million per year
You can catch Brad Nessler’s commentating whenever you watch college football or a college basketball game on CBS Sports. The 63-year-old sportscaster from St. Charles, Minnesota, began his career broadcasting for radio stations on Georgia Tech basketball on WGST-AM from age 24 until he was 28. In 1990, Nessler started working for CBS Sports calling various games in NFL and college football and basketball.
The sportscaster also appears annually in the NCAA Football video-game series made by EA Sport. He left CGS Sports for a few years and commentated with ESPN and ABC Sports – before returning to CBS in 2016 as lead play-by-play announcer. In his Twitter account’s signature, Nessler claims he’s “New to Twitter, but not to the game.” He also landed 2 small roles in film. One in 2018’s drama “I Can Only Imagine” and another role in the 1985 comedy, “The Slugger’s Wife”. He played the role of an NFL announcer in the first and as a reporter in the latter.
Michael Kay - YES, ESPN Xtra
Salary: $3 million a year
As veteran sportscaster and host of the Michael Kay Show, Michael Kay has spent the last 2.5 decades covering play-by-play sports games and currently holds multiple Emmys for his outstanding coverage of various games. As a native New Yorker, the broadcaster began his reporting career in high-school and began his career in sports in 1982 by working for the New York Post as a general sports writer.
Kay has since become an announcer for the New York Yankees and remains their announcer to this day. In 2002, he began hosting his show, The Michael Kay Show on YES Network and Sirius XM Radio channel 202, in which he talks about a variety of topics related to current sports and popular culture.
Linda Cohn - ESPN
Salary: $3 million per year
ESPN SportsCenter anchor, Linda Cohn, is one of the 25 most influential women in sports. Her love for sports started at a very young age, as she was a big sports fan from the time she was little and would watch games on TV with her father. Cohn started playing hockey in high school and continued throughout her entire high school term.
Her first job as a sports anchor started as the WALK-AM radio station anchor in Patchogue, New York and continued working radio for 7 more years until she was hired by ABC, making her the network's first full-time U.S. female sportscaster on national radio. Cohn has worked with ESPN from 1992 and later became a SportsCenter anchor, a role that she still plays today. One of the most widely recognized moments in her career was anchoring her 5,000th SportsCenter episode, that’s more than any other episode in any ESPN anchor's history.
Paul Maguire - HDNet
Salary: $300,000 per year
Former Los Angeles Chargers and Buffalo Bills linebacker Paul Leo Maguire is almost 80 years old and still kicking. At the time of his peak in the mid-’60s, Maguire went on to break many AFL records in punts and punt yards and has since changed careers and become the popular color commentator for ESPN and NBC. The retired AFL player has appeared in many Chick-fil-A commercials during the Super Bowl. He was originally scouted by an AFL representative and was offered an $8,000 salary which was a lot of money at the time.
Maguire was born way back in 1938 in Youngstown, Ohio and has been happily married to Beverly Bauer since 1962. His main career highlights include 3 AFL championships in 1963, 1964 and 1965. He has played a total of 151 games throughout his professional career. Maguire was inducted into the Youngstown Sports Hall of Fame and the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame.
Bill Simmons - HBO
Salary: $24 million per year
Arguably one of the most successful and accomplished American sportswriters and analysts in the world, Bill Simmons is a true favorite of the crowds. Simmons' distinguished career has included founding the sports and pop-culture website The Ringer, working with ESPN for 15 years, hosting his own podcast called "The B.S. Report" and being one of NBA Countdown's top analysts for 2 years. He was named the 12th most influential person in online sports by the Sports Business Journal in 2007, making him the highest-rated person on that list to not hold an executive position.
Simmons released his first New York Times best-selling book in 2007 titled "Now I Can Die in Peace", an anthology book with his best writings on sports throughout the years. He then went on to release another bestseller in 2008 called "The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy" where he pondered various philosophical and historical questions regarding basketball. It's no secret that Bill Simmons is in love with the various Boston teams, not surprising since his educational and work-related journeys both began in Boston.