Maria Taylor has had a wild couple of years. “You can’t make up the story lines that end up leading to my very first Super Bowl,” she says now, in her first full interview since the controversy that led her to leave her longtime perch at ESPN for NBC Sports.

The broadcaster has ambitious plans for her future, but she could use a clone right now. Taylor is not only cohosting the Super Bowl in Los Angeles this Sunday, but acting as one of the main faces of NBC’s 2022 Winter Olympics coverage—which means she’s been in constant head-spinning motion, jetting between her home in Atlanta, NBC Sports’ Stamford, Connecticut, Olympic headquarters, and Los Angeles, where she’s being fitted by Armani for her Super Bowl outfit.

The 34-year-old didn’t realize that she’d already checked off every box on her sports-journalism bucket list until her family pointed it out. “My mom said, ‘Okay, so you’ll have an NBA Finals, three college football national championships, a Summer Olympics, a Winter Olympics, and a Super Bowl before you’re 35,’” Taylor says. “And I was like, Let’s go!”

For some of us, the prospect of ad-libbing live in front of nearly 100 million viewers at the Super Bowl is equivalent to one of those naked-in-public nightmares. But after eight years at ESPN as a sideline reporter and increasingly prominent show host, Taylor sees live TV as her “sweet spot.” “You have to know your information inside and out, because a fan can literally just jump in front of you, or someone can scream something super crazy,” she says. “But I feel like I draw on the sideline reporter in me, where you’re in the middle of a huge game, the crowd’s going wild, you’re responding to coaches or players. That’s where I started my career, so I only ever knew the complete and total chaos of live television.”

Taylor combines the energy of the college athlete she once was (she played basketball and volleyball at the University of Georgia) with the poise of a well-trained politician. She laughs easily, something that has probably come in handy over the last year. 

In July, The New York Times reported on a leaked recording that revealed Taylor’s white ESPN colleague Rachel Nichols had made comments in July 2020 suggesting that Taylor had been promoted to host of NBA Countdown during the finals because she is Black. After Taylor’s contract at ESPN expired last summer, she announced that she was making the leap to another high-profile gig at NBC. She hasn’t spoken about the experience since. 

Even now, she says, “I’m not terribly interested in going in on where that left me or what happened during that. But I do feel like everything that I’ve learned over the course of my career, whether it was on camera or behind the camera, has most certainly made me the woman that I am today. All it’s done is strengthen my beliefs. All it’s done is made me want to get to my goals without ever sacrificing my integrity.”

When I ask if she’s spoken to Nichols since, Taylor firmly says no. “I don’t want to talk about her.”

Nichols’s comments were made in July 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests exploded across the country. Just the month before, Taylor had engaged publicly with the controversy over New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees and his stance against players who protest during the national anthem. “If [George Floyd’s killing] didn’t affect you and make you want to reassess the way that you’re gonna address a question that includes racial injustice in our country—after you watch that man die in the middle of the street—something’s off,” Taylor said, noting that, while he had apologized for his remarks, Brees’s lack of empathy and education was problematic “when 70% of your league is African American and these are the conversations that you should have had.”

In this political moment, “what we’re seeing is the polarizing of everything, so of course sports is not going to be left out of that,” Taylor says. But her ideal is to be a role model, someone who is always the same person “in front of and behind closed doors.” She believes every step of her career, from having issues with her coaches as a college athlete to what went down at ESPN, “prepared me to get into an industry where you’re constantly critiqued. So I’ve learned from every single situation. It’s made me stronger. It’s made me better. It makes me Teflon.”

When asked if she found ESPN to be a toxic environment, she gracefully turns the question around. “Everything that I’ve learned since I graduated college, everything that I learned was there. I was promoted, given my first opportunities; so many great things happened. So I could never say that.”

One of the things that most impressed her about NBC was that it had a woman, Molly Solomon, in charge of Olympic coverage. “Just to have conversations with her about where she sees sports going, and the fact that she has been given so much power at NBC—that’s a great culture to be stepping foot in,” she says. “I believe in [her] and she believes in me.” As soon as she started her new job, Taylor immediately dove into covering the Tokyo Summer Olympics.

“I don’t think I realized until I got there, but so much of what we do at NBC is centered around women,” she says. In Tokyo, that meant focusing on the stories of Black athletes like Simone Biles and Sydney McLaughlin. “I was completely in full shock, because I had never been in a place where the female athlete was kind of like the leader of the pack.”

Taylor’s NBC deal also offers her flexibility to pursue other projects. “My goal is to be able to produce or direct,” she says, hoping to put the stories that interest her in documentary and scripted programs. “I would like to be able to not only be at the table, but in some ways create my own table.” 

That means working with people at the top of their game, but also creating opportunities for people who’ve traditionally found it hard to get a foothold in Hollywood. “I want us to have an ongoing conversation that looks different from anything I’ve ever seen in a meeting room.”

She announced her first official project during the Super Bowl pregame show: It’s a collab with Lorne Michaels on a documentary about the history of Black quarterbacks. “Now, if you turn on your TV, it is not unusual to see a Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson—you know, insert whoever, they dominate the NFL,” she tells me excitedly. “But it wasn’t long ago that not only was it rare, but it didn’t happen…. It was believed that maybe they weren’t intelligent enough or they lacked the leadership skills.” 

The doc, to air on Peacock, will trace the league’s progress from then to the current day. “Those are the stories that I think go untold, and I would love to hear from the guys who lived it,” she says. “The doors that they opened are crazy.”

Taylor’s also developing some scripted projects, and she says there is a through line: “Every single one of them is going to be an untold story that I hope that when people hear it, they feel like this is something that has been glossed over.”

In an era when specious battles over critical race theory are at the center of the cultural wars, Taylor tells me that her slogan could be: “Tell the whole story.” She continues, “It isn’t derogatory. This is just history.… This is the [first Black] guy who became quarterback in the NFL. Let’s just hear from him. Let’s hear from women who broke the color barrier. I care about all of these stories.”

In the meantime, Taylor says, “I’ll just be doing TV, and I hope a Black girl turns it on and says, ‘You know what I can do? I can host Football Night in America. You know what I can do? I can host the Olympics. I can sit up there with the guys and go toe-to-toe, and I belong there.’ So at the very least, I know I can do that.”

Hair by Michael David Warren. Makeup by Carola Gonzalez. Styling by Erin Walsh. Suit by Christopher John Rodgers. Bra by Versace. Shoes by Aquazurra. Earring by Jennifer Fischer. Photographed by Christian Hogstedt.

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