Jac Collinsworth Joins ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown

The Highlands and Notre Dame Graduate Will Contribute Regular Features

Jac Collinsworth is joining ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown this fall as a features reporter. The Notre Dame graduate will offer player profiles and other unique stories for ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown pregame show starting in September. During the NFL offseason, he will also contribute to NFL Live.

At Notre Dame, Collinsworth created, produced and hosted a weekly ND Live digital series, focusing on the Fighting Irish football team. For three years, he filed weekly player features for head coach Brian Kelly’s nationally-syndicated television show, Inside Notre Dame Football, and he was featured on Showtime’s A Season with Notre Dame Football, where he interviewed athletes on his weekly podcast. He also covered Notre Dame Pro Day in 2016 and 2017 for NFL Network.

Collinsworth worked as an assistant sideline producer for NBC broadcasts of Notre Dame football from 2013-16, and he was a sideline reporter for NBC telecasts of the Notre Dame Blue-Gold spring football game in 2016 and 2017. Collinsworth covered the 2016 Summer Games in Rio as NBC Olympics’ first ever social media correspondent. In Rio, Collinsworth interviewed athletes as a part of the Olympic Late Night with Ryan Seacrest team.

During his last two years of college, Collinsworth co-hosted a radio show, “The Student Section,” on Sirius XM. Beginning this fall, he will co-host a new college sports weekday show on Sirius XM 84, College Sports Nation, in addition to hosting the Thursday Night Football NFL pregame show with Pro Football Focus on Sirius XM NFL Radio.

“The quality of work that Jac has produced in such a short time is impressive. To find someone right out of college with his skillset and media experience is rare,” said Seth Markman, senior coordinating producer for ESPN’s NFL studio shows. “He’s going to bring a lot of ideas to Countdown and he will have a special connection to today’s NFL stars, as well as our viewers.”

Collinsworth added: “Within my first hour at ESPN, Seth Markman and [coordinating producer] Greg Jewell started discussing story ideas. If it were up to me, I would have slept on the floor and started working in the morning. I connected with the energy and passion on Bristol’s campus instantaneously.”

Collinsworth, who grew up in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, is the son of NBC Sunday Night Football analyst and former NFL player Cris and Holly Bankemper Collinsworth.