As the third leg of NBC’s Sunday Night Football crew alongside play-by-play man Al Michaels and the tart-tongued analyst Cris Collinsworth, Michele Tafoya was a paragon of deference and neutrality for 11 years as an NFL sideline reporter, dutifully relating boilerplate tactics, talking points and injury updates when she wasn’t nodding along to softball interviews or fumbling through hammy production gimmicks for viewers who might have been too offline to get the bit. She was almost pathologically committed to not doing anything to draw attention to herself or her gender in an era when sideline reporting was a fast track to national celebrity. Even her football takes hewed to the middle. (“New Orleans doesn’t want to lose to Atlanta twice in a season …”) Anyone who says they saw the 61-year-old emerging as a rightwing firebrand was watching a different game.
And yet here we are. Last week, Tafoya was the decisive winner of Minnesota’s US Senate Republican primary, earning the party’s nomination for November’s general election. Even more striking: she beat back eight challengers, not least Adam Schwarze, the party-endorsed pro-gun, pro-military ex-Navy SEAL, and Royce White, the anti-leftist, anti-trans NBA flameout currently testing WNBA gender norms.
