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Dalen Cuffs rise up the ESPN ranks is a testament to his authenticity

In the fall semester of 2003, Columbia University needed a reminder that it had a men’s basketball team. The campus at large could’ve been forgiven if the fact slipped its collective mind; the unmoored Ivy League program had managed exactly two wins the previous winter. But new leadership had arrived. Joe Jones, in his first head-coaching gig, had ideas to stoke flagging interest and awareness. One was called “Midnight Mania,” a new pep rally-like event, of a kind with Midnight Madness traditions across the country. Its success, of course, relied on people knowing it was happening.

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This is where the megaphone came in.

Someone would walk through campus, megaphone in hand, evangelizing for Midnight Mania, season-ticket sales and the hoops program in general. Dalen Cuff, sophomore guard, volunteered to be that someone.

He learned a couple of things from the experience. One is that the school’s buildings, in a sort of half-square-mile huddle in upper Manhattan, set up perfectly to bounce his voice off of walls and impose upon the day’s lectures. Why, a friend in a literature class asked, am I hearing you yelling, ‘Come and get some tickets’? The other thing Cuff learned: Having a platform and an audience was something he could get used to. “There’s an empowering feeling of having the mic,” Cuff says now. “Anybody who says that’s not true is lying to themselves. It’s different. You have people’s attention. Sophomore year, it was about getting people to come to Midnight Mania and making people laugh. As I got older it was way different.”

A little less than two decades on, Cuff bides his offseason time in Fairfield, Conn., breaking up the days by building swing sets or hitting the beach with his wife and 19-month-old daughter. Because Cuff, 36, has fast become one of the emerging voices of college basketball as a game and studio analyst for ESPN, and because those duties required relocation from Florida, home is now a fairly short distance from the place where he once proselytized about the chance to hang out with Roar-ee, his alma mater’s mascot. But the trip did take a while. It’s not every day that a guard from the Ivy League with pint-sized stats and no professional playing career makes it to that seat. Dalen Cuff, historically, finds a way to make noise.

How you gain the trust of the viewer is through your work ethic and drive, how you deliver it, and being authentic to yourself,” says ESPN analyst Sean Farnham, who regularly pairs with Cuff to form one of the network’s more informative in-studio duos and who, not coincidentally, became good friends with his partner along the way. “Dalen hasn’t wavered.”

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More or less true, though it must be said: Sometimes it was a little less true than more true. Carving a niche of substance in a trade often overly enamored with style is a noble mission, but it can be lonely and disenfranchising too. The kid who announced at the age of 8 his plan to be an NBA analyst after an NBA career surely did not anticipate finishing up college and diving directly into … sports marketing. That kid probably didn’t expect to have to quit a full-time job, or to call high school lacrosse games on Long Island, or to learn Portuguese, in order to wind his way merely to have a chance to yammer about halftime adjustments.

In fact, it might not have been until ESPN honchos Lee Fitting and David Ceisler proposed a move to studio work in 2017 that Cuff was totally convinced what he had to say, and saying it in a voice entirely honest to who he was, mattered more than anything else. “Whether you’re a bloviator or someone in the game, when you have a schtick that people like, that pays,” Cuff says. “I just know, for me, I’m not that person. That’ll never be me. I’m always just going to be me, and try to have fun, educate and entertain throughout the broadcast. For better or worse, that’s what I’m going to give you. I still have big aspirations in my career. But I think I made a decision — my way of doing it was, how do I become myself on camera? And if that’s not good enough, then that’s fine. I believed it would be.”

A conversation with Cuff teems with the names of people who helped him along his way — basically he believes his appreciation is as essential as the support those folks provided, given where he came from — but there’s no small amount of self-determination at work here.

Columbia didn’t offer a specific broadcasting track academically, and megaphone skills only have so many real-world applications. His first television job was an internship at MSG in the summer before his senior year; his role as a Columbia captain meant he couldn’t skip workouts, and a campus job claimed his weekdays, so Cuff took the weekend night shift at the station for $25 a day. The Ivy League hooper waiting for Mets games to finish on the West Coast opened Cuff up to both wee-hour texts from buddies (When are you going to get to the club?) and incredulous reactions from co-workers (Shouldn’t you be on Wall Street right now?). Toss in a management takeover creating what Cuff calls “layers and layers of negativity,” and his first foray into the business had him thinking it might not be a long-term play.

Upon graduation, Cuff linked up with InterPublic Group for a marketing position. His first two events were the U.S. Open and Fashion Week. Not shockingly, a 22-year-old recent college grad loved it. Soon after, though, Columbia approached Cuff about being an unpaid color analyst for men’s basketball games on its new radio network. He agreed, figuring he’d be there anyway as a fan. His first broadcast was a game at Duke, of all places, but it was perhaps most notable for the 50-minute pregame filibuster from Cuff and play-by-play man Jerry Recco when the preceding game ran well short of its window. “We did that game, in that environment, and I took that headset off and I was like, this is it,” Cuff says. “This is what I want to do.”

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He stayed in marketing another five years so he could save enough money to quit and pursue broadcasting. He’d also decided television, not radio, was the true endgame. Cuff knew how every small league handled its games and how many analysts it needed, and he told his first agent where he could fit in those various mixes. After seven or eight months of silence, it became clear a player from Columbia who never made an all-league team was not a hot property. “He couldn’t even get me in the door,” Cuff says. Somewhat ironically but fortuitously, MSG tossed him a raft: spot duty calling high school games on its MSG Varsity property, and he acquitted himself well enough to earn an offer to add some hosting to the package. His eagerness was tempered by his first try at a live promo, read off a TelePrompTer, teasing an upcoming lacrosse game. “You would have thought aliens took over my body, man,” Cuff says. “I was sputtering out sentence fragments like you wouldn’t believe. It was a mess.”

His response — showing up three or four times a week, on his own time, to avoid future meltdowns through hours of practice — neatly fit the dominant leitmotif of his nascent career. “I remember doing an eighth-grade girls game at MSG Varsity,” Cuff says. “It was like Garden City against Wantagh. I’m talking to parents. I’m talking to coaches. I’m treating it like it’s the Final Four. The coaches are like, what are you doing? I’m like, I’m preparing. I don’t know who’s going to see this game. If somebody turns on this game that has a door to open for me, I want them to say, man, that guy was prepared. He knew his stuff. I carry that same thing with me, that same work ethic that my father and mother instilled in me: You have to outwork people to succeed in this business, especially, again, when you don’t have the playing background.”

His new agent at IMG, Aimee Leone, took note. She’d migrated to the representation world after two decades-plus at NBC and basically scooped up Cuff when his primary rep left the agency. Cuff still might’ve been a bit raw, but Leone liked his versatility and felt as if Cuff had command of a voice that belied his relative inexperience. When she dug a little deeper, she was stunned by Cuff’s single-mindedness, the sense of purpose, driven by a desire never to wonder what might have been. So Dalen Cuff became her mission.

As it happened, NBC Sports Network had acquired a package of Ivy League games. Leone knew precisely who to call at her former place of employment. She told her client she needed a pitch to get him a look for an analyst job. Cuff leaned on his experience in the league, arguing that only someone who played in the Ivies would understand the depth and nuance of the rivalries and how the programs operate, that his past lent him more credibility than any other candidate. It got him in the door. Leone was on a business trip, in a Lima, Peru hotel, when her phone rang. NBCSN was offering Cuff the job.

He’d hear the news directly a few minutes later. He couldn’t know that the NBSCN Ivy League duties would expand to a spot with the network’s regional channel in Boston, which would expand to various hosting and sideline reporting assignments, which would inspire Cuff to push toward being part of Rio Olympics coverage by learning Portuguese first from Rosetta Stone and then from an online tutor in Brazil named Carmen, which indeed clinched him a spot on a features team, which ultimately meant he was finally ready to be put in front of decision-makers at ESPN, which led to those people giving him the job he’d done all of this to get.

Cuff couldn’t know, as his agent spread the good word from Peru, that being an Ivy League basketball player, in the end, was how he’d get everything he wanted.

If that doesn’t happen,” Cuff says, “then I’m probably never here.”

“Did he tell you about Al Jarreau?”

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Sean Farnham is asking. The answer is no, Cuff didn’t mention Al Jarreau. But now that Farnham has brought it up, someone absolutely has to fill in the blanks implied by the question. Farnham obliges happily.

A guard named Dejon Jarreau played for Houston. One night, Farnham and Cuff were watching a Houston game and Dejon Jarreau started playing well. Someone invoked Al Jarreau, the late, Grammy Award-winning singer. Farnham opened his laptop and scrolled through the Al Jarreau catalog. After landing on “Roof Garden,” everyone started dancing and laughing and generally acting blissfully ridiculous. From that point on, whenever the energy dipped on long nights in the studio, someone played “Roof Garden” and someone (usually Farnham) started dancing and the vibe would lift and everyone would be ready for yet another halftime hit.

Dalen is willing to try anything, to go anywhere with me,” Farnham says, and while he’s in this context talking about on-air rapport, the thought also reflects Cuff’s greatest feat. He has spent years openly and intently focusing on what he needs to do and where he needs to go in order to achieve all that he wants to achieve, but he has seemingly not become anything close to an asshole, because he’s somehow tempered a necessary self-interest with a sensitivity to those around him. “My first quote has to be that he’s an all-right guy considering he’s an Arsenal supporter,” says Beth Mowins, one of Cuff’s first play-by-play partners at ESPN and, by way of explanation, a Chelsea devotee. “Obviously he’s got the total package. He’s got that Ivy League pedigree, he’s got the basketball pedigree, and he’s just an all-around nice guy. As much as I hate to say all that stuff about Dalen, it’s all true.”

Cuff gets to this place simply. He wants to have fun. There’s no profound calculus to it; if everyone is having a good time in the studio or on the sideline, chances are the product will be better for it. So everyone looks good. That’s why most conversations with Mowins begin with some Premier League trash talk, before sidewinding to movie or television quotes, with Mowins usually having to delve into the well of 1970s classics such as “The Godfather” to slip one past the greenhorn. Camaraderie helps the team. Even Farnham poking fun at his buddy’s meticulous eating habits — salmon and spinach pretty much every night in the cafeteria, burrito bars be damned — spins into Farnham noting he has lost 20 pounds working with Cuff, dieting and working out almost by osmosis. Some people, you just want to be around, and when Farnham found out that he and Cuff would be paired again on Wednesday and Thursday nights last season, he dialed up his friend seconds later.

“I was like ‘Let’s goooooooo!'” Farnham says. “‘We’re back baby! We’re doing it again!’ I was as excited as I’ve been in 10 years here.”

Luke Hancock, Kelsey Riggs, Cuff and Carlos Boozer during the 2020 ACC tournament. Cuff has become an ACC Network voice in addition to his work on ESPN. (Phil Ellsworth / ESPN Images)

It’s not worth much without an aptitude for delivering cogent and informative basketball thoughts. Cuff’s authenticity is fundamental there too; the work is a product of who he is and isn’t. He inhales as many games as he can, in front of a monitor or on his laptop through Synergy Sports, compelled by the built-in fear that someone else is doing something more. He watches every inflection and scrutinizes every detail, sometimes rewatching the same game from a different source, because he can’t be the person who misses a single thing. Some analysts ask researchers to confirm scoring runs or win streaks; Cuff asks for minutia such as a team’s shooting percentage after it led by four, and he may or may not use the nugget, but he has covered in case he must. If someone is still out there who sees a skinny guard from the Ivy League and wonders What does he know?, well, Cuff has to be prepared with an answer.

There’s nothing to lean back on,” Cuff says. “This is it. This is all I got. I got what you see in the camera. You can Google my stats. You won’t be impressed.”

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His analysis hits the viewer without ornamentation. Cuff’s insights are lucid and efficient. He is unafraid to infuse advanced metrics into his spiels, and some advanced word choice occasionally earns him a ribbing from Farnham during commercial breaks, but Cuff can fuse any high-level thinking into language everyone can understand with nary a catchphrase to be shoehorned in. “From the most novice person to the most advanced person, you want to be able to give something they may not know or see,” Cuff says. “If Jay Bilas is watching the game, Bilas knows more than I do about the game of basketball. He’s seen more than I have. But maybe he didn’t know this little thing about that player, or this team. And if you can add that, you’ve now educated the most senior viewer to the most novice, and not lost anybody in the interim. How do you distill it down so it’s digestible, simple and quick, but also insightful?”

Part of it is self-awareness. Straining to get to a line would make Cuff sound silly. “Fans are so well educated now that you can kind of sense when somebody is trying to be something they’re not,” Mowins says, explaining why the “honest and true” approach, as she puts it, works for Cuff. Part of it is drawing on what’s embedded in him. Cuff’s father, Dennis, played for Duquesne in the 1960s and was headed to New York Knicks camp before a draft notice derailed those plans. Years later, Dennis watched games and explained poor defensive rotations to Dalen, or answered his inquisitive grade-schooler’s questions following a practice for the travel team he coached. Dennis died in 2012, before he had the chance to see his son on television, but surely he didn’t have to watch to know: Dalen Cuff is only doing what was done for him as far back as he can recall being interested in how basketball works.

It benefits him that he wasn’t an NBA player, it benefits him that he wasn’t a star at Kentucky,” Farnham says. “That carrot is out in front of him at all times to continue to push himself and be even more of his authentic self. That’s why people like him. When you watch him, you’re comfortable.”

What people will watch him do next, Cuff can’t say. He can’t even say there is a next. He thought by now he’d have to choose between college basketball and soccer. (Yes, he does play-by-play for ESPN soccer games too, while also handling some ACC Network host duties.) He thought his dual passions couldn’t coexist professionally. They have and they do. So he says he’ll keep doing both and loving it.

Besides, the unknowable isn’t entirely unknowable. Venues may change but the approach will not. When he translates what he sees on a court or a pitch or a screen, Cuff can only be himself. He’s the guy turning complex ideas into something people can understand, and even in the facile little world of sports on television, that’s a tiny act of grace. He makes everyone feel like they belong.

(Top photo of Dalen Cuff: Melissa Rawlins / ESPN Images)

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Christie Applegate

Update: 2024-06-07