Maria Taylor has this week addressed her “tumultuous” exit from what was her “dream job” at ESPN.

The 37-year-old sportscaster joined ESPN in 2013 after showcasing her athletic prowess in volleyball at the University of Georgia, and went on to report on the sidelines for college football, worked as an analyst for NCAA women’s basketball, and worked her way to the NFL sideline reporter role in 2020.

It was a role she had been wanting for years, she said in a TikTok video this week. “I worked for 10 years at ESPN and loved my time there, but the ending came a little tumultuously,” she said.

Leaving ESPN was not something that came easy for her, she admitted. In fact, she was distraught. “I’m going to be completely and totally honest, I cried,” Taylor said in the social media post. “I cried for two straight weeks while I was in Tokyo covering the Olympics, because I literally flew from the NBA Finals to Tokyo and I thought to myself ‘Like, what have I done, what am I doing here? I don’t know anyone here. It’s COVID’.”

There were other issues, too. New York Times reported at the time that a private phone call leak showed a dig from heavyweight sportscaster Rachel Nichols, who called Taylor a “diversity” hire.

“I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world – she covers football, she covers basketball,” said Nichols in the leaked audio. “If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity… go for it. Just find it somewhere else.”

Taylor now works for NBC Sports

Taylor now works for NBC Sports ( 

Image:

Photo by Nick Cammett/Diamond Images via Getty Images)

Nichols apologized to Taylor after the audio was leaked. The departure from ESPN saddened Taylor. “To be honest, I was grieving something,” she said. “I was grieving the idea of what I had for my dream job and my dream had changed. So I was walking into realizing what the new life would look like, so I was grieving and that took about two weeks.”

One week after she left ESPN, though, she joined NBC Sports. In 2021, Taylor joined NBC’s Sunday Night Football show as a panelist. The next year, she was promoted to lead play-by-play commentator for Sunday Night Football, and hosted the program. She’s also covered tennis, hosting the semi finals and finals of the men’s and women’s bracket in the 2022 French Open. More recently, she hosted NBC’s coverage of the 2024 Summer Olympics. She’s worked significant college football events for the network, too.

“I’m thankful for maturing and… realizing that four letters don’t define me,” she said of ESPN, before adding: “Three letters don’t define me, my job doesn’t define me. I get to define who I am and want to be in this world and if that means I’m changing carers and locations, it means absolutely nothing – and it’s nobody’s business.”