Maybe the most unexpected call of Suzanne Smith’s career led to the history books.
It came one mid-week day in January 2022. Her season as a CBS Sports director for NFL broadcasts was over. She was content, heading into the offseason with a glow, again one of the top-rated NFL-broadcast directors in the business.
The name that popped up on her phone that day — Harold Bryant — was her boss at CBS Sports. Something was up.
“Where are you?” Bryant asked her in that moment.
Get off the sidelines and into the game
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“I’m in Connecticut walking my dogs with my wife,” Smith said, pausing her stride.
Then Bryant asked the history-writing question:
“How fast can you get to Kansas City?”
Smith had a pretty good idea what that meant. CBS was broadcasting the AFC Championship between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Kansas City Chiefs that Sunday. Something had clearly gone awry.
“I’m turning around right now,” Smith said, high-tailing it back to the house.
Within hours she was on a plane, headed to Arrowhead Stadium. The director originally assigned to the game by CBS Sports, it turned out, wouldn’t be able to work the AFC Championship due to contracting an illness.
As the director for CBS’ NFL coverage’s “B Crew,” Smith was being asked to save the day. Her colleagues were suddenly counting on her in a way they rarely had before.
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That Sunday, Smith demonstrated why she has become a legend in her field of sports-television production.
“That was the most challenging game I’ve ever done,” Smith told Outsports. In her longtime role with CBS Sports, she is again being honored as part of the Outsports Power 100, highlighting the most powerful and influential out LGBTQ people in American sports.
“I’d had about 10 cameras for most games,” she said of her regular-season schedule that spanned the NFL season. “That game we had 65 cameras.
“I was also working with a different crew. All the camera operators on the crew, I’d worked with almost all of them at some point in my career, so that helped.”
That chance opportunity made Smith the first woman to direct a broadcast of an NFL Conference Championship game. She is still the only woman to ever direct any NFL Playoff game.
Smith is literally one of one.
On that Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium, Smith told Outsports, she was really happy with that AFC Championship Game broadcast.
“It went really well. The game came down to a game-winning field goal attempt. The crew was really good. We had a plan and we followed the plan and everything was great.
“It was a compliment to me that my boss chose me to do it.”
The brass at CBS Sports have chosen Smith to execute many assignments over the years. She is still the director of the NFL “B Crew” for CBS Sports, with commentators Ian Eagle and Charles Davis.
In fact, earlier this year she was the replay director for Super Bowl LVIII, with the Chiefs defeating the San Francisco 49ers in Las Vegas. She and the crew won a Sports Emmy Award for that broadcast.
Last weekend, Smith and her crew found themselves back in Las Vegas, broadcasting the Pittsburgh Steelers’ blowout win over the Raiders.
Her crew was down one regular cameraperson for this most recent game in Las Vegas, but for good reason. Mika Brown had decided months earlier to marry her wife, Lindsey Yeager, that weekend coincidentally in… Las Vegas.
While she couldn’t be there to operate her camera for the Sunday afternoon game — and some of the crew took the opportunity to celebrate her marriage — Smith was moved by CBS Sports’ decision to broadcast photos of the nearby wedding during last Sunday’s NFL broadcast.
“It made me so happy to talk about this woman on our crew getting married,” Smith said. “And it was so ‘everyday.’ The fact that she’s gay, she’s a woman, it’s my crew, it’s pretty cool. The world has changed.”
Smith can certainly remember a time — starting at CBS Sports in the 1980s — when life for a woman in sports, let alone a gay woman, was different. No broadcast at the time featuring Joe Montana and Dan Marino was going to include on-air congratulations for two women marrying.
As a production assistant at CBS Sports in the 1980s, Smith knew she had to prove herself, maybe beyond the men on the staff.
Even then, she’d lose opportunities to them.
She remembers one instance vividly.
Making little money as a lower-level staffer, she was angling for a key promotion. It meant more attention, more respect, and yes, more money.
“Everyone knew I was going to get the promotion,” she said.
Instead, a man got the job.
“‘You’re definitely the most qualified,'” Smith remembered her boss telling her. And then, wait for it: “But Scott told me his wife is pregnant, so he definitely needs this more than you do.”
She may have had to wait, but in the next year she did get a much-deserved promotion.
Since then, Smith has worked more Super Bowls than she can remember, probably “seven to 10,” she said.
Along the way, one of Smith’s proudest accomplishments is being part of the team that launched the show “We Need To Talk, which centers the voices and stories of women in and around major sports.
“We try to dig into the stories — women in flag football or indigenous women in sports. The first show we ever broadcast was right after the Ray Rice incident.
“Our first show was so powerful. There were many women on the set. Several of them said, ‘I’ve never spoken about this publicly, but I was abused.’ And they told their story.”
While her career, of course, continues to play a massive role in her life, she and her wife are spending more and more time in Truro, the Cape Cod town adjacent to the tiny Provincetown that has captured the LGBTQ community’s imagination for decades.
As the houses close up for the season on Cape Cod, Smith will still be doing her job. She and her wife will be moving from Truro back to Connecticut for the offseason — The Cape is their summer refuge. Yet they already look forward to the first chance next year to head back to “The Cape” and total bliss.
In the meantime, you’ll be able to witness her handiwork each week on CBS. Plus she has a couple other special games coming up: Smith is directing one of the Netflix broadcasts of NFL games on Christmas Day this year, and she’ll also be directing one of CBS’ NFL Playoff games in January.
She admits that you may not notice much of what she or her crew are doing. After all, “if the game is 30-0 people really don’t notice all the effects.”
Yet behind everyone’s enjoyment of the NFL games on CBS is a woman who has worked hard and opened opportunities for other women, as well as men, along the way.
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