Game Days

While working out in the gym on an off day in December, Tiffany Blackmon got an unexpected call from her boss, Steve Ackels.

Ackels is vice president of event production for ESPN’s coverage of “Monday Night Football” and college football. He told Blackmon the network wanted her to be in Glendale, Ariz., on New Year’s Eve.

She was being asked to cover the Fiesta Bowl, the College Football Playoff semifinal game, from the Texas Christian University sideline as the No. 3 Horned Frogs took on No. 2 Michigan. The winner would go on to play in the College Football Playoff National Championship.

On Dec. 31, with purple confetti raining down on the field after TCU’s victory, Blackmon interviewed the winning coach, Sonny Dykes, about his team’s poise and determination. In her second college football season with ESPN, it was a high-water mark for a tenure that’s already seen Blackmon on-air at the 2022 Rose Bowl.

Recently honored as one of the Georgia State Alumni Association’s 40 Under 40, which recognizes remarkable doers, creators, innovators and leaders, Blackmon, 38, got her start as an intern in Georgia State’s Athletics Department. A soccer player since the age of 8, she stood out on the pitch as a four-year starter at North Gwinnett High School and got a scholarship to play at Georgia State, where she lettered all four years and learned to love writing under the pressure of a deadline.

From her first jobs in local sports to five years reporting for the NFL Network to her current role with ESPN College Football, Blackmon has stayed focused on telling the stories that viewers care about and building relationships that make the athletes and coaches she covers comfortable opening up on camera.

The daughter of an NFL linebacker and coach, Blackmon grew up around professional football. She recalls watching the likes of sportscasters Pam Oliver and Erin Andrews and thinking to herself, “I can do that.”

When a professor at Georgia State mentioned a job opening for a production assistant at The Weather Channel, Blackmon leapt at the chance to work behind the scenes in TV, though her goal was to get out in front of the camera as quickly as possible. With little on-camera experience to put on her resume, she vowed to stay at The Weather Channel for a year to work on her reel.

After shooting and editing her own package about her old high school soccer team, she stuffed headshots and DVDs into more than 60 envelopes addressed to TV stations across the country, hoping someone would take a chance on her.

After 14 months of rejections — if she got any response at all — she was on the air in Lake Charles, La., as part of a three-person sports department. In a small market at a small station with a small budget, Blackmon did it all and leaned on the lessons she learned at Georgia State, eventually attracting the attention of larger and larger stations.

“I made what I had work, and KPLC-TV in Lake Charles took a shot,” Blackmon said. “I would shoot, write, edit and anchor my entire sportscast. I learned how to shoot at Georgia State.”

If Blackmon learned about TV at Georgia State, she learned about sports at home. Blackmon’s father, Don Blackmon, moved the family to Atlanta to join Dan Reeves’ Atlanta Falcons coaching staff in 1997 after coaching stints with the Giants, Browns and Patriots. Don had been drafted in the fourth round by the Patriots in 1981 and spent his entire playing career — seven seasons — with New England. (Tiffany was born in Attleboro, Mass., about 40 miles from Boston.)

After a year in Lake Charles, Blackmon moved to Waco, Texas, a much larger television market where she was the sports director at KXXV-TV, then to Oklahoma City, where she was a member of a four-person team at KFOR-TV, before landing in Houston at the short-lived Comcast SportsNet station in that city.

Tiffany Blackmon earned a scholarship to play soccer at Georgia State, where she lettered all four years. (Photo: Georgia State Athletics)

Two years after Blackmon arrived, new ownership and a reorganization left her without a job. By then she had gotten to cover the Rockets and the Texans, but perhaps more importantly, forge friendships with reporters and producers that would give her the encouragement and contacts she needed a few years later.

From Houston, Blackmon moved back to Atlanta without a job, recalling that her mom and dad had dropped her off in Lake Charles in a U-Haul, and just a few years later picked her up in another.

The setback didn’t last long for Blackmon, though, and within months she landed a role reporting for the NFL Network, which made her the first Georgia State alumna to sign an NFL contract.

From her homebase in Atlanta, she traveled across the country to cover games and file stories.

After five years, she left the NFL Network to work for the Major League Soccer expansion team in Charlotte, N.C., under the same ownership as the Carolina Panthers. It seemed like a great fit, she thought. She’d gotten to know team officials while working for the NFL Network (“Everything is relationship-based, and I made relationships with everybody I covered,” she said), and she looked forward to the opportunity.

She moved to Charlotte March 1, 2020, but by the middle of the month, the COVID-19 pandemic had shut down in-person sports along with much of the rest of the country. It was the second major blow to her career and one that could have ended it.

“They kept me on as long as they could, but they did furlough me,” Blackmon said.

While she continued looking for work, Lericia Harris, a friend at ESPN she’d met in Atlanta, recommended Blackmon for a one-off gig covering a college football game in the fall of 2020. According to Blackmon, it didn’t go well.

“It was horrible. I felt like I was absolutely terrible,” Blackmon said.

By December 2020, Blackmon had moved back to Atlanta and begun to imagine getting out of TV entirely. She confided in fellow journalists who encouraged her not to give up.

Buoyed by their confidence, she approached a contact at ESPN who asked if she’d be interested in working for ESPN College Football, despite what Blackmon felt was a rocky performance the previous fall.

“They signed me for that 2021 season, and I found my footing,” Blackmon said. “And I started 2022 covering the Rose Bowl!”

The 2022 college football season saw her star rise even further.

Last November, she emceed the 2023 College Football Playoff news conference, previewing the weekend of events surrounding the title game in the host city of Los Angeles, before flying to Eugene, Ore., for the Oregon-Utah contest.

She went on to cover TCU during the game that sent the Horned Frogs to the National Championship. She had sideline interviews with Dykes, weighed in with pregame coverage on ESPN’s “College Game Day” and, during Media Day, beatboxed on “SportsCenter” while two TCU players engaged in a friendly on-air dance-off.

She went on to report from the Jan. 2 ReliaQuest Bowl, interviewing Mississippi State quarterback Will Rogers after the team’s poignant, nail-biting 19-10 win over Illinois.

“It’s been fun because I’m not doing anything other than being myself,” Blackmon said. “Throughout my entire career in this business, I’ve never tried to be anything other than that, and it’s cool to be able to do that at ESPN.”