Dave Sims

Biography

Sims grew up in Philadelphia and attended Bethany College in West Virginia, where he played one year of varsity football, finishing third in kickoff returns in the Presidents' Athletic Conference, and catcher for the Bison baseball team (in Division III) and majored in mass communications. He began his career as a sportswriter for the New York Daily News. Early 80's a Sports Reporter for the short lived "Satellite News Channel". Radio, Sims became the host of WNBC's SportsNight in the mid-1980s (replacing Jack Spector), a five-hour nightly sports call-in show that was a precursor to the all-sports talk format of WFAN. He went on to cohost the midday show with Ed Coleman on New York's Sports Radio 66 WFAN on in the early 1990s, the show being nicknamed "Coleman and the Soul Man". He then became a weekend sports anchor at WCBS-TV in New York and also was a radio host for the New York Knicks.

From 1990-1992 Sims was the radio voice of Temple Owls football in the Big East Conference.

In 1991, Sims joined ESPN as a play-by-play announcer for college basketball, and added college football in 1998. He primarily called Big East contests on the ESPN Plus regional network.

Prior to taking the permanent play-by-play position on Sunday Night Football, Sims was the #2 broadcaster for Westwood One's Sunday afternoon NFL doubleheader. He replaced Joel Meyers on the Sunday Night Football game in 2006. Sims worked "Sunday Night Football" games from 2006 to 2012. In 2013 Sims returned to Sunday Afternoon NFL action, working with former Arizona State and Pittsburgh Steeler QB, Mark Malone.

In addition to Sunday Night Football, Sims also calls college basketball for Westwood One, with his most notable call to date being the George Mason-UConn regional final in 2006 (where #11 seed George Mason upset top-seed Connecticut to become the second #11 seed in history to reach the Final Four).

While working in other sports, he occasionally provided Major League Baseball play-by-play for ESPN and did an internet radio show for MLB.com. In 2007, he took the opportunity to return to baseball full-time as part of the Seattle Mariners television broadcast. One of the few African-American broadcasters in the sport, he is also perhaps the only one of that group not to have played in the major leagues. His broadcast partner is former Mariner Mike Blowers.

Sims was the broadcaster on the FOX television network on April 21, 2012, describing Philip Humber's perfect game. However, the game was broadcast in its entirety only in the Chicago and Seattle markets, because the rest of the country heard Joe Buck and Tim McCarver call a game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Because the game was broadcast on FOX in both markets, Sims had to call the game from a neutral standpoint as a broadcaster and not as the usual Mariners broadcaster, even though his team lost to a perfect game.

Just four months after calling Philip Humber's perfect game, Félix Hernández threw the first perfect game in Mariners' history. Sims called the game for Root Sports in Seattle. This is the first time that one broadcaster has called two perfect games in the same Major League Baseball season.

Notable catchphrases

Sims is noted for using the following catchphrases on Mariner broadcasts:

NFL broadcasting partners

NFL on Westwood One