NBC Sports President Rick Cordella on Strategy, Streaming, and Looking Ahead

Rick Cordella gets it. As President of NBC Sports, he’s got a fieldbox view of the shifting media landscape and the outsized role live events are playing in its evolution. Cordella is confident in the network’s big picture programming strategy, but he’ll be the first to admit the broadcast math has become rather daunting.  

“I remember deals when I first came to NBC sports in 2006,” he says. “They could be done on the back of a napkin at a bar. How much you're paying and what content you're getting.”  

Those bar napkin days have gone the way of the moleskin helmet, of course. Today’s negotiators find themselves juggling a complex tangle of highlights rights, live rights, replay rights, and legacy rights, to name a few. 

Despite the chaotic media environment, or perhaps because of it, live is making a resurgence. In an age when viewers time-shift everything from The Real Housewives to the evening news, it may come as a surprise that their hunger for real-time events appears to be streaming in the other direction. Last year’s Kentucky Derby saw its biggest tune-in since 1989. Sunday Night Football pulled its highest numbers since 2015, and the Paris Olympics were the most-streamed Games in history, up 40% from all prior Summer and Winter Games combined. It drew 67 million total viewers per day across broadcast, cable, and streaming. 

WWE has nearly doubled its reach in the four years it’s been on Peacock. WrestleMania 41 was the #1 most-watched WWE live event of all time on Peacock. On the soccer pitch, Premier League had its biggest season in 2024, and 2025 is doing huge numbers too. Overall, NBCUniversal has tripled soccer’s reach in the US.  

“It’s happening across the board,” Cordella says, “And it isn’t just sports. The Thanksgiving Day Parade had its highest rating of all time, too.” Whatever the sea-change may be in viewer habits, the appetite for live is growing – which puts sports in the programming strategy driver’s seat. 

Legendary February 2026

NBC Sports and Peacock are queued up for an unprecedented 2026. Legendary February earns its moniker with a marathon 17-day stretch that includes the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, Super Bowl LX, and NBA All-Star Weekend. The NBA and WNBA seasons take the baton and lead up to the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Spanish on Telemundo and Peacock in June and July and the WNBA Finals and Big Ten Football Championship Game in the fall.  

The NBA is Coming Back to NBC 

Cordella is the last person to disparage the network’s competitors, but he feels there’s something special about how the must-see TV network handles basketball. “I think NBC Sports did the NBA a bit differently,” he says. Fans remember Michael Jordan racking up NBA titles, the Chicago Bulls’ player intros, the sights and sounds of the arena, and the John Tesh theme at tip-off – and they feel the same excitement on the precipice of the NBA returning to NBC and debuting on Peacock. (And yes, Tesh’s iconic “Roundball Rock” is returning to the network as well.) 

All of it made basketball fans feel like they were courtside, and that knack for making a big event feel like a truly big event is part of what made the NBA on NBC such a monocultural phenomenon to begin with. NBCUniversal has been an industry leader in live events for generations and it has the knowhow to create big moments that bring in huge audiences time and time again. 

The NBA season also dovetails nicely with the existing NBC Sports lineup. Basketball peaks in Q2, keeping fans glued to the action from the Super Bowl straight through to the FIFA World Cup and the Summer Olympics. The season tips off in October and, including the WNBA, runs through most of the year. Half of the 100-plus regular season games and playoff games will stream exclusively on Peacock, while the other half airs on big NBC (and simulstreams on Peacock), thereby driving both parts of the network’s ecosystem. 

NBCUniversal's 2026 Lineup

The network’s 2026 sports calendar may be a fan’s dream come true, but it’s just one part of a year packed to the rafters with great content. Next year also happens to be NBC’s 100th anniversary, an impressive milestone. In addition to the Tier 1 live sports events, highlights of NBC’s centenary will include Sunday Night Football’s 20th Season, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Kentucky Derby, Live from the Red Carpet, the network’s award-winning 24/7 news coverage, and late-night icons like Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show. In a tip of the hat to its century of broadcasting, “NBC 100” will commemorate 100 years of culture-defining content with a star-studded variety special – a once-in-a-lifetime television event.