How Colorado transformed Mike Davies from lost soul to TV giant

Fox Sports EVP and CU alum Mike Davies has produced hundreds of marquee sporting events, including the Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup and World Series. (Photo via Sports Video Group)

He first saw it in the Flatirons.

After two decades at Fox Sports, where he’s now executive vice president of field and technical operations, Mike Davies has reached what he’s coined “operational nirvana.” He’s thriving as a leader and innovator in producing the world’s biggest live sporting events.

It wasn’t an easy or preordained rise. But upon graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994, it was simple.

Born in New York City, Davies moved to England as a child. His family returned after several years, living in Chatham, New Jersey, a sleepy suburb outside the city that never sleeps.   

It was a carefree childhood, one he enjoyed but never beat a path through, so his father encouraged the study of communications as a gateway to direction. He enrolled nearby at the University of Delaware, but after traveling more, gravitated to Colorado’s natural wonder. 

He transferred to CU in 1992 and finished with a degree in journalism, which to him was a “real head-scratcher.” As a concentration, he settled on broadcast production management. 

“Perhaps because it had the fewest requirements at the time,” Davies said. “But [the] joke was on me, because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 30 years.”

Colorado stoked creativity, passion and a vocation for adventure. He hitchhiked 1200 miles around Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, trying and failing as a fisherman while losing count of new friends. 

Fresh out of college, Davies knew he wanted the imaginative life. But inadvertently, he found another fervor he never knew he had: athletics. After interning with HBO Sports, he briefly followed Hollywood dreams as an editor for Inside Edition. 

But quickly, the world’s entertainment capital faded into bustling gossip. Davies met a crossroads.

“That beginning of not being focused was pretty frustrating for some of the people I talked to,” he said. “So that’s why my advice always is that you should pick something and run in that direction.”

Sports, it was. He restarted with HBO and the East Coast in 1997, becoming the region’s production director for 10 years. There, he pioneered the company’s transition from SD to HD programming, an almost unheard-of move for its time.

“Nobody seemed to want to do it, so I did it,” Davies said. “I’m not an engineer. I don’t purport to be. But it told me that where you can see a need and fill a need, especially in some of those things nobody wants to do or nobody thought to do, that you can really get your foothold in things.”

HBO Sports produced some of the business’s best documentaries, Inside the NFL and plenty of prestigious boxing matches. Davies appreciated its “walled garden,” but the “other side” enamored him. He wanted to do more live sports.

In 2005, he was called to replace a retiring director of field operations at Fox Sports. Between six FIFA World Cups, seven Super Bowls, 20 World Series, cutting-edge advancements and exponential brand growth, it hasn’t been too shabby.

“It wound up working like a big small business,” Davies said. “You had a lot of opportunities to do a lot of things. And while there was certainly oversight, and you had a boss, you were also empowered to come up with those kinds of ideas that can propel sports to different levels.”

What started as a meandering home of the NFL, playoff baseball and NASCAR bloomed into a diversified beacon of sports broadcasting. Fox widened audiences for international soccer, combat sports, motorsports and college athletics. Fox Sports 1 was born in 2013, a viable competitor to ESPN for studio analysis and primetime fixtures.

Davies was right there as a senior VP, managing the grunt work for live events and overseeing the implementation of new tech. He’s been at the forefront of bringing games to life, including a leap in picture quality to 4K beginning in 2017.

In 2020, Fox became the first network to broadcast a Super Bowl in 1080p HDR (high dynamic range), another pixel-boosting risk that's now an industry standard.

“We weren’t afraid to swing and miss, and we still aren’t,” Davies said.

It’s not sports’ most glamorous job, but it’s never stopped him from pushing boundaries. He won two Sports Emmys in 2022, one for perhaps the most ambitious major sporting event venue in recent memory. Davies helped produce MLB at Field of Dreams, a game near the cornfield site of the classic 1989 film.

He was awarded three more Emmys last year, one for aiding the MLB’s excursion to Rickwood Field, the nation’s oldest existing pro baseball park, as a tribute to the Negro Leagues. His favorite production came from a war zone, when Fox NFL Sunday broadcast from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in 2009.

Since 2019, he’s served as chair of Sports Video Group, a leading association of sports broadcast innovators.

After checking countless showbiz boxes, he splits time living in Santa Monica and Virginia with his wife and son. Yet he’s been ready to give back, especially to where his journey started.

For three years, Davies has helped facilitate CU’s Sports Media Summit, a gathering of industry professionals who provide insights and networking opportunities for his alma mater. Three traits that shaped his career cut deep across its panelists.

“You can teach anybody TV,” Davies said. “But I think what can’t be taught is passion and attitude and curiosity. And if you don't have those things, it's not that you can't make it in this business, but you're missing out on a lot.”

This year’s summit is the most elaborate yet, with Davies holding a “fireside chat” with X Games CEO and former Buffs football star Jeremy Bloom. It’s set for March 5-6 and is open to all CU students.

At a sports media titan, Davies doesn’t stop. But he’ll always make time for what set him in motion, like inquisitive student journalists. Even if it means being late to a meeting with NASCAR.