Mike Tirico defends himself over ‘asterisk’ outcry from Lions’ fans

Detroit News

Mike Tirico has lived in Metro Detroit for a quarter-century, and has long been a booster for the city and its sports teams.

Mike Tirico has lived in Michigan for 24 years and has long been a booster for the revival of the city of Detroit.

Now, he’s having to defend himself against a Lions’ fan base that wasn’t pleased with his choice of wording in the moments immediately after Detroit’s 21-20 season-opening victory over the defending Super Bowl-champion Kansas City Chiefs on Thursday night.

Tirico, mostly via social media, is taking significant heat over using the word “asterisk” to describe the Lions’ win, because the Chiefs were missing holdout defensive tackle Chris Jones and injured tight end Travis Kelce.

“If you have a problem with the word ‘asterisk,’ that’s a very legitimate complaint,” Tirico told The Detroit News on Friday afternoon, between prep meetings for his work on Sunday’s broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys-New York Giants game. “However, it should be in context.

“If you want to take out the middle of the comment and make it the whole comment, then you don’t understand properly how to attribute things.”

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After the Lions sealed the win over the Chiefs, kicking off a season of perhaps unprecedented hype with a victory, NBC cameras showed players celebrating on the field.

That’s when Tirico said, in full:

“We saw the Chiefs go into Foxborough in 2016 (editor’s note: it was 2017) and win on Opening Night, and that announced to everyone that the Kansas City Chiefs were going to be a factor,” Tirico said during the NBC telecast. “This has an asterisk because of no Chris Jones and no Travis Kelce, but after what you saw at the end of last year and what you saw tonight, the team in blue and silver is for real.”

Lions coach Dan Campbell was asked Friday about the asterisk comment and the mentality surrounding it.

“Well, is there an asterisk by the 1-0?” Campbell said.

Many of the clips making the rounds on social media Friday just played the 13-word half-a-sentence that included the word asterisk, and that’s left Tirico frustrated.

Tirico said the point he made about how the Lions finished last season, 8-2 in their last 10 games and the season-ending win at Lambeau Field to keep the Green Bay Packers from the playoffs, and how they started this season should’ve been included in social-media clips and aggregated news stories about the word “asterisk.”

“If you have a disagreement with the ‘asterisk,’ fine,” Tirico said. “Even Cris (Collinsworth) does. … That’s OK. In a three-and-a-half-hour broadcast, you’re not going to agree with everything I say.

“Could I have worded that slightly differently? Sure. … If you choose to ignore 3 hours and 15 minutes of other positive comments, if that’s the way you live your life, so be it.”

More: Wojo: Lions storm the national stage, stun the champs, 21-20

After Tirico’s closing comment on the broadcast, Collinsworth said: “You only get a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down in this league, and right now, the Detroit Lions got the thumbs-up.”

Tirico, 56, had some defenders on social media channels, including several journalists.

But the Lions’ fan reaction was decidedly one-sided against him, and that stung.

Detroit has few public ambassadors who give more time than Tirico, who watched Friday as dozens of news outlets across the country wrote about and — in many cases — panned his work, without calling for comment.

“We’ve lived there for (nearly) 25 years,” Tirico said in an interview with The News, “and anybody who’s been around Metro Detroit knows by our words and actions what we think of our home area.”

tpaul@detroitnews.com

X: @tonypaul1984

Is this a case of “Detroit Vs. Everybody” gone wrong? Several locals came to Tirico’s defense.

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