Vice Chair, Elected 2025
Elected to the Board: 2016
Voting Trustee
Michael T. Tirico is one of the most recognizable faces and voices in television sports coverage. In June 2016, he began working for NBC Sports Group on an array of high-profile properties, including Sunday Night Football, the Summer and Winter Olympics (which he hosted), and other major events. In the Fall of 2025 he will serve as the lead play-by-play announcer as NBC Sports returns to coverage of the NBA. His work has been recognized with multiple Emmy award wins and nominations.
Tirico began working at NBC after 25 years as one of the signature voices on ESPN/ESPN Radio and ABC Sports. In 2006, he assumed the role of ESPN Monday Night Football’s play-by-play commentator. Tirico’s other assignments included play-by-play and hosting assignments for the NBA, college basketball, golf, tennis and other major events. He previously hosted The Mike Tirico Show on ESPN Radio, a nationally syndicated sports news and discussion program that launched in 2007 from the studios of WAER-FM—the same public radio station at Syracuse University where Tirico began his broadcasting career.
In 1988, he earned a dual bachelor’s degree in political science from Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and in broadcast journalism from the University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Tirico serves as vice chair of the Board through early May 2029. He serves on the Board’s Executive, Advancement and External Affairs Committee, and the Student Experience Committees; the National Campaign Council Executive Committee; the Subcommittee for Marketing and Communications; and the Free Speech Trustee Advisory Group. He served on the Advancement and External Affairs Giving Levels Ad Hoc Workgroup. His Syracuse University service includes membership on the Newhouse Advisory Board and the Sport Management Advisory Council in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics. He served on the search committees for the senior vice president of communications and marketing in 2017; the dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications from 2019-20; and the dean of the Falk College in 2023. He received the George Arents Award in 2005, the University’s Outstanding Young Alumni Award in 1996 and Newhouse’s Marty Glickman Award for Leadership in Sports Media in 2017. Tirico received the 2022 Dritz Trustee of the Year Award.
He and his wife, Deborah Gibaratz Tirico ’89 (Martin J. Whitman School of Management), have established the Mike Tirico Scholarship Endowment. They have supported other initiatives in the Maxwell, Newhouse and Whitman Schools; WAER public media organization; and Syracuse University Athletics, where she serves on the Orange Council.