By Steve Kelly
You might want to file this report under the title:
THE ULTIMATE IRONY
President Donald Trump spent most of 2017 and part of 2018 bashing the NFL for its non-policy of penalizing players who knelt when the national anthem was played.
And he’s now being wooed to appear on the Super Bowl telecast on Feb. 3!
CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said yesterday that the network has had talks with the White House about interviewing Trump during the Super Bowl 53 pregame show on Feb. 3, but that there will be “no announcement on that right now.”
Trump, who has cut back on his criticisms of the NFL and its players this season, sat down with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly for a prerecorded interview that aired during the network’s pregame coverage of Super Bowl 51, which took place a few weeks after his inauguration in 2017. Last year, Trump did not do an interview with NBC when it aired the game.
With a large television audience guaranteed each year, Super Bowl pregame interviews with U.S. presidents have been a semi-regular affair ever since George W. Bush sat down with CBS’s Jim Nantz ahead of Super Bowl XXXV in 2001. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, did one in every year of his presidency, and it became something of a yearly tradition to watch him avoid making a pick in the game.
McManus said that this year’s Super Bowl pregame show will be four hours long, down an hour from last year’s five-hour extravaganza on NBC.
“I promise you it will be the fastest-moving pregame show you’ve ever seen,” he said.
