SOUTH BEND — Thanks in part to his own unique surname, Noah Eagle of NBC Sports has shown remarkable on-air restraint when it comes to wordplay and Notre Dame football star Jeremiyah Love.
“Love hurts” was a natural for such a bruising runner.
“Love from above,” flowed as well for a leap-happy ex-track star with Heisman Trophy hopes.
And when the best player on the Irish put the home team ahead late in the Week 2 shootout with Texas A&M, Eagle calmly observed that “Love is in the air in South Bend!”
Was he referencing the 1977 pop hit by John Paul Young and Milk & Sugar or the 2023 Netflix rom-com of the same name? That, like so much of Eagle’s understated work, is left to the viewing audience to determine.
“I think I’ve used maybe five or six already,” Eagle told the South Bend Tribune this week in a phone interview. “A lot of it is whatever feels right in the moment. I really don’t plan it necessarily ahead of time.”
In that same game, a 41-40 loss for the Irish, Eagle burned his “Price is Right” card for the season on a Jadarian Price breakaway score. When Price took a kickoff return back for a 100-yard touchdown last month against USC, Eagle referenced the recurring aspect of that feat for Price against the Trojans.
“He has done this before!” Eagle said over the roar of the crowd at Notre Dame Stadium.
“You have a general idea of all of the options and opportunities that are available to you,” Eagle said. “I’ve got pride, so I don’t want to repeat it. I’ve kind of kept track of which ones have been used and which ones are still somewhat on the table. You want to try to save them for the biggest moments.”
With Eagle set to call Saturday night’s home meeting with Navy along with game analyst Todd Blackledge, it could be time to empty the tank when it comes to Love’s regular end zone visits.
“A lot of it is timing and circumstance, but ‘temptation’ is the correct word,” Eagle said. “You don’t want to overload it. You don’t want to necessarily keep going back to the well because then your audience is saying, ‘All right, this guy is just trying everything.’ You want to make sure you’re timing it properly.”
While Notre Dame’s in-house video crew has serenaded the crowd with “All You Need is Love” and “The Power of Love” this season, the 28-year-old Eagle is bound to spring something even more pop-culture appropriate when the inspiration strikes.
“Two (Love puns) means that you had just two all-time spectacular plays,” he said. “But usually one, and it has to be held for some time where it really is going to hold weight.”
Eagle, the lead voice on NBC’s Saturday night college football package since 2023, addressed a number of other topics ahead of the annual meeting between the 10th-ranked Irish and the 7-1 Midshipmen:
On meeting the moment of an instant classic
“With each experience it just gets a little bit easier, and you get a better sense of that build. A lot of times, what I’ve realized, and I think I really have done much better with this as I’ve gone from game to game, year to year, in terms of building the drama, the drama generally builds itself. You actually can do more detriment the more that you do. A lot of times, as the game gets better, I start to do less. That was something legendary producer Fred Gaudelli had told us before that (2023) Ohio State-Notre Dame game. When the game gets good, you do less and the audience will appreciate that. I’ve really embraced that where sometimes less is more. I don’t necessarily have to be going over the top on explanation or description because the pictures, the sounds, the sights, that’s going to do a lot of the talking.”
On working in clever catchphrases
“I’ve really learned that you have to trust your gut in a lot of these moments, and sometimes it really hits and people really like it, it resonates. And there are other times I’ve said things and people are like, ‘What did he just say?’ And you have to live with that. It’s kind of part of the job.”
On the idea of a group chat among legacy sportscasters
“I feel like we should start that. It sounds pretty fun. Yeah, that sounds like it could be adventurous. I feel like the conversations would be hilarious, and I feel like Joe Buck would consistently bring some outstanding humor, levity and perspective. I’ve talked to Joe before, and I think he’s handled himself, especially over the last decade-plus, incredibly well, just given his circumstance and how quickly things happened for him. I’ve really used him as a template and a role model in that sense. … I’m always rooting for all of them. And for any that are coming up, the next wave of the second or third generations, I’ll always be here to help.”
On following his father, Ian Eagle of CBS, into sports play-by-play
“Everybody always just assumes that I sat down in my dad’s office and he just told me everything I need to do to become a broadcaster, and that’s just not how it occurred. I sat down while he was doing work and I watched and I would go through media guides when they still existed in physical form. I just would sit there in his office and sift through the 2003 Atlanta Hawks or the 2005 New York Jets media guide. I just was interested in it because I enjoyed sports and I enjoyed learning and that was fun for me.
“I never sat down and said, ‘Hey, I want to learn how to broadcast.’ I watched how diligently he prepared, and so I clearly took a lot of that and built my own style and version of it. I would go to games with him and I would watch how he interacted with people: outside of the booth, inside of the booth, inside of the truck, security guards, ushers, parking attendants. They all knew him, and he knew all of them, and I thought that was awesome.
“I watched how he would handle himself leading into on-cameras, how he would gather himself. A lot of it was osmosis because I got to see it in the environment. I got to see how the sausage was made from the time I was 4 years old all the way through college.”
On the challenges of his father’s legacy
“You have to prove yourself consistently and you also have to make sure that you’re blocking out the noise. I feel like I’ve done a good job in terms of blocking out noise over the course of my career. I’ve come to an understanding now, and I think I had this very early and my parents have done a great job of instilling this in me: The reason I do this job is not because I’m the son of somebody and that’s how it goes. The reason I do this job is because I love doing the job. I don’t really care what perceptions are out there. I just care that I’m doing the job at a high level, I’m serving my audience consistently well, and if I’m doing those things and enjoying myself along the way, then I’ll feel like I’m a success.”
On his boyhood dream of being a ‘TV dentist’
“I really wanted to install crowns. Maybe that could’ve been a specialty, but filling molars, that sounds like it’s maybe more up my alley. The reality was nobody wanted to sit home on a Wednesday at 1:15 and watch somebody get dental work while they’re home sick from school. People loved the ‘Maury Povich Show’ or ‘Jerry Springer’ because it was highly entertaining and you never knew what was going to happen. Those were the classic ‘stay home from school’ shows of my childhood. Would anybody realistically want to watch somebody who had just completely messed-up teeth get them fixed? I started to realize no, nobody wanted to watch that.”
Mike Berardino covers Notre Dame football for the South Bend Tribune and NDInsider.com. Follow him on social media @MikeBerardino.
