A Pitt alumna soars as the sideline reporter for Super Bowl champs

In the final minutes of Super Bowl LIX, it was former Pitt quarterback Kenny Pickett who took to the field to finish out the Philadelphia Eagles’ most recent NFL championship triumph. Just a few yards away, another Pitt graduate was making a mark of her own during the most-watched event of the year.

Devan Kaney (A&S ’13) is on a first-name basis with some of the most prominent names in sports broadcasting. But it was a long road for Kaney to get to where she is today, as the new sideline reporter for the Eagles.

While figuring out where her degree in communication rhetoric might take her, Kaney recalls receiving guidance from screenwriting professor David Dalessandro, writer of the oft-quoted 2006 film “Snakes on a Plane.” With his encouragement, Kaney moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, rising from an executive assistant to the head of motion pictures at Lionsgate Studios.

But after all her work behind the scenes, Kaney had an itch to be on the other side of the camera.

“I wanted to be on screen,” she says. “Not as an actress, but in broadcasting.

“It took a while for me to gather the confidence to tell people, ‘Hey, I want to be on air, and I think I can do this.’”

Kaney went to American University in Washington, D.C., to get her master’s in journalism, thus reinventing herself as a broadcaster. She took her first reporting job in Boise, Idaho, before eventually moving to Chicago and finally to Philadelphia in 2018, where she has since covered the teams she grew up cheering for as a child.

She was promoted to sideline reporter halfway through the Eagles’ winning 2024 season, but she says the Pitt pride still shines through. After her first game in her new role, the Eagles PR team knew they had to assign Kaney to interview Pickett. 

“They were laughing,” Kaney says. “They’re like, ‘H2P!’

“The Pitt roots are strong.”’