Ed Daniels Death, Obituary – After a cardiac incident last month, Ed Daniels, a native of New Orleans who started the city’s first-ever high school sports television program, passed away on Friday from complications. Daniels spent five decades presenting the story of Louisiana athletics. He was sixty-seven years old. Before being transported back to New Orleans on August 5, Daniels stayed in a hospital in the Los Angeles region for 11 days.
Prior to the media business adopting the phrase “multimedia journalist,” Daniels worked in all three of the major categories of journalism. Daniels’ main residence was television, where he spent more than 40 years visiting New Orleans sports fans’ homes: 33 years at WGNO-TV, when he became the station’s first and, to date, sole sports director, and the first 33 years at WDSU-TV.
Shortly after Daniels started working at WGNO, an independent station at the time, in 1992, he introduced Friday Night Football, the first program of its kind in New Orleans that featured highlights from the games played that evening. Since the beginning of the program, Hall of Fame coach J.T. Curtis has co-hosted and contributed as an analyst to FNF.
Never one to back down from a debate, Daniels wrote sports columns for the Clarion Herald for almost 20 years (he replaced his former WDSU boss, Buddy Diliberto), and he was a frequent contributor to Crescent City Sports and its predecessor publications since their inception in 2008.
For the most part of three decades, he co-hosted the Three Tailgaters show on radio with Ken Trahan, a classmate from high school and college, on a number of stations, most recently at 106.1 The Ticket. He also worked as a radio analyst for broadcasts of the University of New Orleans men’s basketball team, New Orleans Night Arena Football games, and Saints preseason games.
Daniels made it a point to highlight the achievements of high school athletics, even though many sports departments in the region would prefer to concentrate on national news and professional and collegiate athletics. Due to FNF’s popularity, two more programs were produced: Friday Night Fastball, which featured baseball, softball, and other spring sports, and Friday Night Sports, which covered winter sports.
Daniels had an influence on high school athletics outside of television. Daniels and Timmy Byrd, the former coach of Riverside Academy, collaborated to establish the Allstate Sugar Bowl National Prep Classic basketball competition in 2011. Last winter, the event expanded to five separate brackets for boys and girls from its original format of a tournament for 16 males teams.
Similar competitions in baseball and 7-on-7 football were inspired by the basketball event’s popularity. This fall, there will be a volleyball in-season event. Additionally, the National Prep Classic organizing committee staged the girls basketball state semifinals and finals at the Alario Center in February 2022, a time when many of the LHSAA select and non-select state championships were split at different locales.
Daniels did much more for WGNO than only report on school sports throughout his tenure. In 1996, the station launched its news department. Prior to that, he hosted a game program called “N.O. It Alls,” which was produced by Brandon Tartikoff, the former NBC executive. Furthermore, when the Zephyrs brought Minor League Baseball back to New Orleans in 1993, WGNO purchased the broadcast rights, and Daniels was the team’s first-ever TV play-by-play announcer.
Daniels won the Louisiana Sportscaster of the Year award three times (1997, 2014, and 2018), chosen by his colleagues and given by the National Sports Media Association. In 2014, he also took home the Press Club of New Orleans’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
His alma institution, Archbishop Rummel High School, recognized him in 2013 by inducting him into the Athletic Hall of Fame. He received this accolade with Trahan, a classmate and lifetime friend. In addition, he belongs to the De La Salle athletic hall.
Following his cardiac incident, Daniels received an enormous amount of support. Hundreds of voices joined in prayer for a recovery at a rosary on July 31 at St. Philip Neri, the parish where Daniels and his wife Robin were members. Others, like as Tulane coach Jon Sumrall and LSU coach Brian Kelly, who could nearly always bank on Daniels’ presence at their media availability, opened their first press conferences of preseason practice by mentioning Daniels by name. Daniels received his diploma from Loyola University in 1979 after graduating from Rummel in 1975. Daniels leaves behind five children and five grandchildren in addition to his wife. Plans are still being made for the funeral.