ESPN Senior NFL Insider and award-winning journalist Chris Mortensen is leaving the network after 35 years on the air. In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the staple of ESPN’s coverage of the National Football League revealed that he had recently had conversations with his family and made the decision to depart from the “Worldwide Leader,” a move that caught many people in the sports media world by surprise.
Mortensen was diagnosed with Stage IV throat cancer in early 2016 and returned to ESPN following his recovery from the disease. Since then, he has undergone routine scans and checks to ensure he is in good health. Now he is prioritizing his well-being and will watch the NFL from afar, marking the end of his storied career in sports media.
Mortensen has been responsible for breaking some of the most monumental news stories in the history of the sport, including Peyton Manning’s retirement from the game in 2016. The California native frequently appeared on SportsCenter and ESPN Radio programming, along with Sunday NFL Countdown. One of the contributions he made was the “Mort Goes to Camp” segment in the summer of 2009, a 24-day journey where he traversed the United States to visit 21 NFL training camps. During the next year, Mortensen and colleague Adam Schefter collaborated on separate cross-country road trips to visit all 32 teams.
Before joining ESPN, Mortensen covered the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Falcons for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was the winner of the 1987 George Polk Award, conferred for outstanding achievement in the field. After reporting on the NFL at the national level with The Sporting News and The National, he began consulting for the CBS Sports studio show, The NFL Today.
Mortensen joined ESPN in 1991 and quickly immersed himself as an invaluable part of the network’s football coverage, which included a prime time Sunday night game until 2005. ESPN assumed the Monday Night Football property in 2006 and has been broadcasting the marquee program ever since. NBC Sports started broadcasting Sunday Night Football in 2006 featuring play-by-play announcer Al Michaels, analyst John Madden and reporter Andrea Kremer.
