This is an entry in a profile series of inductees for the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2025. The induction ceremony is set for June 28 in Natchitoches.
Ed Daniels wasn’t a Hall of Fame athlete, coach or administrator.
He might as well have been all three.
He had the discipline and competitive nature of Hall of Fame athletes, the game-planning and people skills of a Hall of Fame coach and the organizational and talent-evaluation skills of Hall of Fame administrators.
On top of that, he was a heck of a teammate.
Daniels applied all of those abilities in building a distinguished broadcasting career that earned him posthumous inclusion in this year’s Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame induction class as a recipient of the LSWA's distinguished service award in sports journalism.
The native of New Orleans who graduated from Rummel High School and Loyola University began his 47-year broadcasting career as a sports intern at WVUE-TV in New Orleans in 1977.
He once said, “My career goal was always to work in my hometown.” With the exception of a stint as sports director at KPLC-TV in Lake Charles (1980-81), he did just that. He worked as a sports reporter and weekend anchor at WDSU and as sports director at WGNO from 1992 until his death on Aug. 16 at age 67.
The WGNO station manager broached the idea of producing a half-hour NFL program. Daniels had a less obvious but more astute idea.
“Let’s do a high school football show,” Daniels told the station manager. “Let’s do something that’s completely local, that no one else is doing that people will respond to.”
After “this big debate” took place within the station, the trend-setting "Friday Night Football" debuted in 1992, became an instant hit and coverage of prep football in Louisiana hasn’t been the same since.
Robert O’Shields was Daniels’ photographer and right-hand man for "Friday Night Football."
“When one episode of the 'Friday Night Football' show was done, Ed was already looking at the next week right after the show,” O’Shields said. “He was already looking at what was going to be the big matchups for the next week.”
As O’Shields would drive the two to cover an LSU or Tulane game the next day, Daniels would be on the phone with high school coaches, preparing previews about their upcoming games, lining up feature stories for the week, and gathering the name of candidates to be player of the week and scholar-athlete of the week.
The success of the show eventually led to it becoming a one-hour program.
Daniels was named Louisiana Sportscaster of the Year by the National Sports Media Association for 1997, 2014 and 2018. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Press Club of New Orleans in 2014.
The distance from New Orleans to Baton Rouge didn’t prevent Daniels from treating LSU’s nationally prominent athletic programs as though they were in his backyard. Similarly, the lack of national prominence of the programs in his backyard didn’t prevent him from treating them as though they were nationally prominent.
If you were an athlete, coach or team whose story deserved to be told, Daniels was going to find you and tell your story — whether it was at a playground or at a high school outside of the immediate New Orleans area.
Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame broadcaster Ro Brown met up with Daniels at Loyola and worked with him in a variety of places.
“He liked the purity of prep sports,” Brown said. “It was still a game where it wasn’t the elite athlete. He liked the idea of the 160-pound nose guard, the kid just playing hard, never gonna play in college, but he’s an all-state lineman. He liked the community of it, the connection that you had with people that you don’t necessarily feel as closely with professional or collegiate sports.
“He liked the high school coaches. They were normal, ordinary people who did extraordinary things. Most of them didn’t have this air about them, didn’t act like the professional coaches. You could talk to them. You saw them in the store. You saw them at the Mardi Gras parade. I think that’s why he liked prep sports. It was just fun to cover.”