WHEN FOOTBALL fans get their first look at Mike Norseth on KJZZ-TV this fall, they might decide that the rookie color analyst is just another handsome talking head, but they'll only be partly right.
He does have The TV Look. Check it out: hair by Pat Riley, clothes by Christian Dior, face by Calvin Klein.Thankfully, there's more. This man also knows what he's talking about; he knows football. He not only knows what a blindside blitz is, he knows what it feels like and probably what it tastes like. We're talking about a guy who played in the National Football League for five years.
Well, played is not exactly the right word; watched might be better, but it isn't quite right, either. For five years Norseth was a reserve quarterback in the NFL and, through fate and the cursed good health of his rivals, he never won a promotion. Instead, he spent every Sunday afternoon studying the game like a chessboard, shoulder to shoulder with the head coach.
So Mike Norseth knows football. He also knows whole life and securities. Norseth sells life insurance for New York Life in Salt Lake City. But in his spare time he'll provide color commentary for University of Utah football games this fall on KJZZ.
He'll be a rookie in the TV business, but he'll bring expert knowledge to the booth - the kind of knowledge collected from six years in professional football, counting one year in the World League of American Football.
It all began at Snow College, of all places. Unrecruited at his Southern California high school, Norseth wound up at Snow College for two years, which set the stage for two record-setting years at Kansas.
Drafted in the seventh round by the Cleveland Browns, he stayed there for one year. He spent the next two seasons with the Cincinnati Bengals, which put him on the sidelines for the 1988 Super Bowl. He spent another season with the Green Bay Packers and then a final season with the New York Jets.
It was a long stay by NFL standards, and yet, in all that time, he played in just one regular-season game - he pulled mopup duty against the San Diego Chargers. All he did was handoff - and run once for five yards. In his five NFL seasons, he never threw a single pass.
The only real exercise Norseth got was the year he played for the Birmingham Fire of the WLAF. He started the entire season and took the team to the playoffs. But that was it. A year later he was out of football.
Talk about bad luck. Each year a handful of no-name backup quarterbacks get playing time simply because they happened to be in the right place at the right time; guys like Jeff Blake, Jason Garrett, Bucky Richardson and Gus Frerotte. Turk Schonert and Frank Reich made long careers out of it. Injuries being one thing you can always count on in the NFL, it seems that all a quarterback needed was a team and patience and he'd get a chance.
It never happened for Norseth.
"It's hard to root for guys to get injured," he says.
If Norseth didn't get the playing time that other players did, he did get one thing most players only dream about: a Super Bowl ring. He also received a lengthy tutorial on the art of the game. For five years he stood side by side with Sam Wyche, Lindy Infante, Bernie Kosar and Boomer Esiason. Norseth never wanted to be a coach - he wanted more stability than that - but he did hope for some connection with the game.
After retiring in 1992, he began the life insurance business, but he also volunteered to do a talk show, free of charge, on an all-sports radio station in Salt Lake City. When the station went under, he was invited to do color commentary for prep games on Sports Radio 570. He didn't approach the job lightly. Before each game he visited the practices of both teams to talk to players and coaches, collecting information he could share with listeners.
His homework didn't go unnoticed, which is what led to a job in TV this fall.
"This gives me a chance to be involved in football, and it helps me be a part of the community," says Norseth, who came to Salt Lake City in 1990 to stay with friends, then fell in love with the place and called it home.
At 31 years old, he has made a good start in his post-football life, but he still finds himself missing the game that he played for 20 of the first 28 years of his life. Every time he catches the smell of a freshly mowed grass field, he thinks of fall and football and getting ready to play again.
"I'm not sure I'll ever get it out of my system," he says.
Maybe he'll never need to. This fall he'll be watching football games from one of the best vantage points in this house. He should feel right at home.