There was one NBC Sports on-air staffer who correctly predicted that Medina Spirit, a 12-1 shot trained by Bob Baffert and ridden by John Velazquez, would win this year’s Kentucky Derby. That staffer had never appeared on a Kentucky Derby broadcast until Saturday — and he isn’t even a full-time NBC Sports employee.
But Steve Kornacki, the NBC News and MSNBC national political correspondent who has found cultural acclaim with his fast-paced and engaging election data segments, provided sports viewers with the winning ticket when Medina Spirit went wire-to-wire to win the 147th Kentucky Derby on Saturday.
…and @SteveKornacki takes Medina Spirit… pic.twitter.com/O4LmpwYrqM
— NBC Sports PR (@NBCSportsPR) May 1, 2021
He also made himself some nice change with a $100 win bet on Medina Spirit.
As I said on the air, if you’re giving me double digit odds on Baffert, I’ll take it! pic.twitter.com/0s4UMbNUCA
— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) May 1, 2021
Kornacki served as an insight analyst for NBC’s Derby coverage after previously analyzing NFL playoff probabilities for NBC’s “Football Night in America” studio show. Prior to the Derby, Kornacki and I had a long conversation as part of a podcast on how he ended up on NBC’s coverage of the Derby as well as “Football Night in America.” Here’s the conversation, lightly edited for space.
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How did you initially get integrated with NBC’s sports group?
Well, it wasn’t anything that had been on my radar. I’m going to say it was a week after the election last year, the middle of November. I got a call from my boss on the news side saying the sports people had reached out and wanted to talk to me about potentially doing something with “Football Night in America.” I was like, “Wow, really?” He said, “Would you be interested?” And I said, “Yeah, I think I would be.” A couple of days later, they connected us on a call. We started talking about it. I’m a fan. I’m an NFL fan. I’m a football fan. Obviously, I’ve been watching Sunday Night Football for a long time. I know it as a viewer, I know it as a fan, so from that standpoint, I was tickled to get the chance. My concern was that I wanted to make sure coming off the election it wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t just here’s something with the board and something with football.
What we started talking about right away was the idea that at that point in the season you are well into the season and the playoff race is taking shape, so using the board to break down the playoff race in each conference. When we started looking at that, started building the graphics, started thinking about the hits, it really struck me that it actually seemed like a logical extension of what I’d been doing in the run-up to the election. Because so much of what I was doing in September, October, right up until the morning of the election, was here’s your road to 270 map. OK, let’s say Biden wins Pennsylvania or let’s say Trump gets Wisconsin. The different scenarios involved, how they change the math, how they change that probability for each candidate winning. That was essentially what we were doing with the playoff race. You know, what if the Ravens win today or what if the Dolphins lose? When I started to look at these segments, I said, “OK, this doesn’t feel gimmicky to me.” It’s two different worlds, but it feels very similar to what I’ve been doing, and so that gave me a little bit of confidence that it could work.
One of the things that’s clear when it comes to your political work is that you are facile with data. You have a long history in it. And you obviously have a lot of television experience. But when it came to the NFL and it when it came to examining playoff possibilities, I know that you’re a longtime sports fan, but did you feel comfortable talking about it on live television? You don’t have 20 years of experience in sports television. You have it elsewhere.
Right. I’d never been to NBC Sports in Stamford (Conn.) before November until I went for the first show. I had none of that experience. So obviously that gives me a little bit of apprehension. But what helped a lot, I think, is that I had absorbed it as a fan. My whole life, I’ve just followed it. I’m from Massachusetts, the Patriots were my team, and during the years of my childhood they were nowhere near the playoff race. But I do remember 1994 when things started to turn around. I follow the playoff race obsessively. It’s just been part of my experience, whether it’s the Patriots or just in general following the NFL. I’ve always followed it as a fan, so it wasn’t like learning a new language.
One of the things for me that has always been interesting covering sports media is the importance of having a good debut broadcast. If someone has a very good broadcast, let’s say as Tony Romo did, there’s a massive carryover heading forward. If the converse happens, which I think it’s fair to say happened to Jason Witten on Monday Night Football, you sort of get tagged reputationally right or wrong, and that carries for a little bit. One of the things that happened for you with “Football Night in America” was the critical acclaim that you received for it. Very clearly NBC Sports saw an opportunity and decided to continue with you. How aware were you, at least on that first night, that things were going well?
Well, I mean, thank you. I appreciate hearing that. The answer, I guess, is I was not too aware, and this is just true no matter what I’m doing. This is true on election night, this is true on a random hit during the week on the news side, this is true in general. I’m always mildly terrified that something bad/career-killing is going to happen when I go on air. There’s always those jitters.
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You’re a professional television person, Steve That’s very normal. It breeds paranoia.
Yes, there’s the massive insecurity that comes with that. So that’s why I was so worried going into it, if worried is the right word about it not seeming gimmicky. I was getting some buzz because of the election and sometimes there’s an instinct to take something that is getting a little buzz and just expose it somewhere else and assume it’s going to work and then not have a plan. So that was why it helped so much in the weeks before we did those segments that I really felt we had something that was going to work. My sort of jitters that day, that night, were just more about my own ability not to freeze, and to deliver the way I knew I was capable of delivering it. I got positive feedback and people were great to me afterward. I appreciate the way you’re framing it now. I hadn’t heard anything on that level, but I’ll certainly take it.
What has NBC Sports said about you heading back to “Football Night in America” and doing something similar for the 2021 season?
We’ve talked about potentially doing more of it. I think the idea has kind of been to do the same, where you pick it up later in the season. Obviously, you’re not going to be talking about that for Week One. We’ve had some conversations just on what else can we do here, and let’s keep talking and figure some things out.
You said that you were an ESPN addict as far back as elementary school. You talked about growing up with the Patriots. Have you found that trafficking in the data of politics has helped you for your sports assignments?
I think the answer is yes because what I realized when we started putting the “Football Night in America” hits together, it was just how much overlap there was stylistically in terms of how I was going to deliver the information, how similar what I was doing with the playoff probabilities was to what I had been doing with elections, with polling, with road to 270, with all that stuff. The election data thing I’ve been doing since 2014. That was the first midterm I got to play that role for, so 2o14, 2016, 2018, 2020 election cycles plus a bunch of special elections in between and the run-up to every election. I’ve been doing this pretty heavily for years now, and I think there’s a style, there’s an approach, through repetition that I have developed, and it was good to discover that a lot of that was exportable to something else. Again, talking about stage fright, anxiety, these sorts of things, the best antidote to that is to have some confidence. I had some confidence that it could work once I saw how similar it was to what I’ve been doing.
Do you see similarities between sports and politics, and particularly when coverage gets to be too horse-racing, when people are tagged winners or losers of the day?
It’s interesting because I think there are a lot of parallels between sports and politics, between how sports is covered and how politics sometimes is covered. I think there’s a tendency a lot of times to try to mix and match the two. I’m remembering early in my political journalism career, going back 10, 15 years covering state politics in New Jersey, I can remember there was a governor’s race. This would have been 2005, so more than 15 years ago. I had an instinct being a sports fan and thinking about how sport was covered and to try to match it with the governor’s race. The idea was to write a feature every week that wraps up the week and basically decides who won the week in the campaign for media coverage and events or whatever. I quickly realized that this isn’t going to work because unlike a baseball game where you get two runs this inning, three runs that inning and you add them up at the end, whoever has the most runs wins. You can win every week in the campaign and then blow it the last week. Or you could win every week in the campaign and even win the last week in the campaign but there are just structural factors where you are going to lose by 20 points. There’s just elements in politics that kind of blow up the comparison. I realized that back then, and I’ve shied away from the idea of the winner of the day, who won the day, who won the week.
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I know people use the word or the term “horse-race journalism” as pejorative and certainly a lot of negative connotations there. To be honest, I embrace it in that I do think there is an aspect to politics in elections, certainly in particular elections, where whatever side you’re on, whoever you’re for, whatever political party you’re with, they’re all asking the same question on some level, and that is who’s winning, who’s losing, and why and what could change it? What could blow it for my candidate? What could get my candidate back into it? Why aren’t people rallying behind my candidate? Things like that. I do think there’s a role there where I try to get at those questions, to look at what the data is telling us about those questions. Also, to be honest, it’s also about the limitations of the data as well.
Have ever been to the Kentucky Derby as a fan?
Never been. This is my first trip.
NBC has historically had handicappers on its coverage. You have to figure out a way to provide value for the broadcast, provide value for the viewer, but also obviously not do the straight handicapping that the traditional horse-racing handicapper will do. What can viewers expect from your role in this production?
I’ve actually got the ultimate edge to bettors who are trying to figure out the Derby or any other race. It’s a pretty good method. You take whatever horse I’m betting on and don’t bet it. I think that will give you a pretty good advantage. (laughs)
So I was just defending horse-race journalism in the political context. Now we get to do horse-race journalism in the horse-racing context. Not as much the undercard races, but the Derby itself, it is to look at all the patterns, all the trends, to put data together from the history of this race and put that in context. How have the favorites done? I think there’s an interesting story there because when I was growing up and getting into horse racing, favorites lost every year at the Kentucky Derby. They went two decades and not a single favorite came in. Now suddenly we’ve had 10 favorites win in just the last 20 years. There’s been a change there. Look at the pace of the race if you want to get into how these races are run. I can remember a bunch of Derbies from the past where you had these deep closers, horses that came from way in the back of the pack, and suddenly you look up in the home stretch of the race and they’re charging the lead and they win. But look, more recently since 2013 when they instituted this point system to qualify for the Derby — every horse that has crossed the finish line first since they instituted the point system has been within, I believe, four lengths of the lead in the first half-mile of the race. I say “crossed the finish line first” because you had that weird one in 2019 when Maximum Security came in first and then got DQ’d. These horses go to the front now and they stay there and that wasn’t really the case consistently. That’s been the case pretty consistently here for almost a decade.
I’m giving you a sense here of where my mind is — favorites, pace of the race, where the horses come from. You’ve got these Derby prep races being run this winter, this spring, around the country and which ones have the best history recently of turning out the winner? That would be the Santa Anita Derby. Which have the worst history recently? That would be the Wood Memorial in New York. It’s trying to recognize that there’s an audience for this event that is larger, obviously, than any other horse race for the year. It’s filled with people who in many cases probably watch one horse race a year. They are looking at this screen of 20 horses and are trying to make sense of, “How can I sift through these?” I’m going to try to use data to help people maybe identify a nugget or two.
Did you grow up a horse-racing fan?
I’ve been to the track too many times to count. I think this is true for a lot of people who get into it. It’s a parent or relative who’s really into it and will take them when they’re a kid. Then they discover they have the bug. I have an uncle who’s very into it. I think I was probably six years old and he took me to Scarborough Downs in southern Maine. It was trotters in the late 1980s. He still likes to tell the story of me giving five straight winners and he didn’t bet a single one of them. I haven’t had that good a night in 30-plus years.
How conscious are you, if you are even conscious at all of it, that some viewers will automatically wonder or question why Steve Kornacki is on a sports broadcast?
I understand it. If it’s out there, it makes sense. I would just say I hope they give me a fair shake, and if they do, I hope they’ll see that it’s not a gimmick. With the NFL, it’s something I know the way the average viewer does. Same thing with the Derby. You have a fan who goes to the track a few times a year and watches some of these prep races and has a few hunches? I mean, that’s me, although I may go more than a few times a year. But that’s me. I hope that comes through. It doesn’t make me a great expert in terms of, “Listen to me because I’m a brilliant tout here and I’m going to give you all these winners.” But I enjoy and appreciate the sport, the tradition, the pageantry, just as much as the viewers do.
(Top photo of Medina Spirit winning Saturday’s race: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)
