Acosta-Ruiz takes long road to NFL Network success
How else to view MJ Acosta-Ruiz’s rise to the national stage other than as a sudden starburst? How else to describe this South Florida woman made good as host of the NFL Network’s “NFL Total Access” show as anything other than an overnight success?
Well, that overnight success took a decade to make and refine and shine.
And before her unexpected entrance onto the national scene, Acosta-Ruiz strategized her steps as if they were a military plan and then defeated rejection, insecurity, loneliness and even gender bias to reach her goal.
“What can we tell you, we’re super proud.” Maria Acosta, the newly minted star’s mother, says in Spanish from her home in Kendall. “It’s not only because of what she’s doing at the NFL Network, but because of all her work and success throughout many years before that.
“We’ve seen the effort she’s made and how hard she’s worked. And she did it while never giving up. When things didn’t go her way, she would always try again and try again, until she got what she wanted.”
The NFL Network, the football league’s media platform, on Sept. 7 announced MJ Acosta-Ruiz as its new host of the network’s signature show.
That signaled a neon-lit milestone for the Miami Sunset High and Barry University graduate. That was the moment her family, who live in the Hammocks neighborhood, realized
their oldest of four children had reached a great height.
For Acosta-Ruiz? It meant a moment to breathe before getting back to work.
“My reaction to all of it is I was very hopeful they would see not only my proficiency in being able to host the show but that that was really a desire I had for many years,” she says.
“When it happened I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were moving forward with me as a host and it was on ‘NFL Total Access.’ I wasn’t expecting it, but I was ready to take it on for sure.”
Just so you know: AcostaRuiz, 35, joined the NFL Network in 2018 as a California Bay Area reporter primarily covering the San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders. Reporters do not typically jump to the anchor chair of a network’s signature show in two years.
But for MJ, born Marjorie Acosta at Jackson Memorial Hospital to Dominican parents, this is a chance to infuse her show with some of her own flavor — as she once did when she spoke in Spanish to implore viewers to vote.
“NFL Total Access” was Acosta-Ruiz’s next logical stop, but she took a seemingly implausible course to get there.
Because people who decide early in life they want to dance and own a dance studio, then become a Miami Dolphins cheerleader, and try out as a Miami Heat dancer, and compete in beauty pageants — winning Miss Miramar and placing third in the
Miss Florida pageant — don’t always become super serious journalists.
But that’s exactly what Acosta-Ruiz did.
“I’d been dancing since I was 9,” Acosta-Ruiz says. “My entire life was encompassed by that. It’s all I thought about, it’s all I wanted to do before and after school, certainly high school and then on through my collegiate years as well.
“When I graduated high school my goal was to start my own dance studio. But to be a business owner you need to be very good at math. And I am not. That’s when I started to search for other career paths.”
The search was admittedly circuitous, but it makes sense in the end.
First you should know that dance factors in Acosta-Ruiz’s current success because it ultimately brought out her perseverance gene. That happened when she got the grand idea of being a Dolphins cheerleader.
The Dolphins don’t take everyone. And Acosta-Ruiz didn’t make the squad the first time she tried out.
And she came close but didn’t make it the second time, either. And she got close again but didn’t make it the third time. Or the fourth.
“There’s a lot of us who walked away several years in a row heartbroken,” she says. “But it’s that tenacity that is another theme in my life of not giving up. I would make it all the way to finals every year and walk away in tears. I’m not going to lie, I’m not to proud to say that I definitely shed a lot of tears not making the team while watching some of my best friends make the team.
“But I knew I could do it. And it was a matter of timing. And that’s also a lesson that carried over to my professional life as well. There’s going to be a lot of times you’re going to be told, ‘No,’ and where you will fail or not quite make it.
“Sometimes it’s on you and other times it’s because the timing isn’t right. But if you want something bad enough, it’s about not giving up in the moments when you feel there’s nothing else after. There always is something else after, you just have to try.”
Familiar with rejection — she also tried out twice for the Heat dancers and didn’t make it — Acosta-Ruiz now was prepared for TV.
But she also got acquainted with success in 2012 when she made the Dolphins squad. And she understood preparation, which she believes is a staple of her journalism success.
“In dance it was knowing the choreography, to the technique, to the history of dance to help you build a foundation,” Acosta-Ruiz says. “Same thing carries over as a sports journalist — understanding the game, knowing the history with the teams and then preparing like a maniac before you go on air.
“Right now I think I do more studying than I did in college. I have binders of research and tabs and highlighters. It’s excessive, I’ll admit. But for me it’s what I’ve always leaned on. Being prepared and studying the craft are the two things that have tied together for me.”
That 2012 season, at the dawn of the Joe Philbin era, was rough for the Dolphins. But for the Acosta family, it was awesome.
“Every activity she had, it was a full van of people going to see her cheer, because it was her cousins, us, her uncles, everybody,” Maria Acosta says. “This family is very close.“
MJ the dancer eventually led to MJ on TV.
NBCUniversal Telemundo had a dance show aimed at young people named “Mun2 the Roof.” And Acosta-Ruiz joined the urban pop show as a dancer.
“That was my introduction to the world of television,” she says. “And I just fell in love with everything about what was going on behind the scenes. I started showing up early to talk to the producers, I’d talk to the camera guys, I’d go up to master control to see what was going on in the control room.
“I’d try to pick the brains of hosts as much as I could. I loved how creative it was and how when it comes together we can touch people in their lives through the screen. “
Yeah, TV here she comes. She got a new job on GenTV, a local independent channel at the time, doing sports and public affairs news in Spanish. Then she went to a show called “Generation Next” for two years, hosting and doing special features. She eventually got a job at WPLG-ABC 10.
It was a break. But it was back-breaking and sometimes heartbreaking.
“I was a jack of all trades,” Acosta-Ruiz says. “I did news, fill-in anchor, traffic anchor, sports fill-in, lifestyle, entertainment, breaking news, the overnight shift. You name it, I did it, just trying to get myself as many reps and job experience as possible.
“I did hard news and that world was not only not what I wanted to do but I really wasn’t cut for that. Doing door knocks at 5 a.m. to a mom who just lost her child to a drive-by, I literally could not stomach it. My heart would just shatter.
You have to have a sort of gumption for hard news to compartmentalize it. And I could not.”
Fernando Acosta, MJ’s father, is from the Dominican Republic. He played that country’s equivalent of professional basketball for his hometown of Santiago De Los Caballeros. He also went to medical school in the Dominican Republic and became a doctor.
He now works as a pathology assistant at Jackson Memorial. And he remembers seeing his daughter at the hospital from time to time while she was on assignment.
“When she began working at Channel 10 here in Miami, we loved watching her,” Fernando says. “But we saw that it was like she didn’t really want to do that work because she wanted to do sports and that’s not what she was doing.
“Sometimes when she had to do reports on people going to Jackson or on autopsies, I’d see her there and she didn’t look too happy.”
Acosta-Ruiz got the chance to cover sports when a San Diego station hired her to anchor its sports segment Monday through Friday. The only problem was it meant moving away from her family.
“As you now know, I don’t really shy away from a challenge,” Acosta-Ruiz says. “So off I went across the country to a city where I knew no one to start this journey. And it was a lot of times I really did fail. There were things I didn’t know, being in that big of a role. There were things I had to learn on my own the hard way.”
MJ’s brother, Fernando Jr., eventually moved to Los Angeles in part to be closer to his sister. But early on MJ felt homesick.
“It was lonely,” she admits. “There’s a difference being able to hop in my car, drive over to my parents’ for dinner to having to call my mom and take into account the difference in time zone so I wouldn’t catch her in her sleep.
“And feeling isolated in a new city and you don’t know anyone and a lot of people don’t look like you. It was really reverse culture shock being in California compared to Miami where it’s so diverse. It was really difficult for me to acclimate and I wasn’t expecting it.”
Back home after visiting with her daughter in San Diego, Maria says she felt “very sad” discerning MJ’s mood. But both parents felt relief their daughter was pointed toward success.
“You know, a parent worries that their kids will pick a career that won’t have too many opportunities, something that doesn’t give them a chance to succeed or realize their aspirations,” Maria, an accountant at Leon Medical Center, says. “Definitely we loved that she moved toward journalism because we knew she’d have work.”
Acosta-Ruiz’s aspirations have encountered obstacles — some, she says, simply because she’s a woman.
“There’s always that little inkling in the back of your mind and in your gut that makes you wonder are people going to think I’m good enough?” she says. “Are people going to think that I belong here? You have to shut that down and remind yourself you do belong here. You should occupy this space and you’ve earned the opportunity to occupy this space.
“You’re a woman, so stand proudly in that. And there’s the thinking, ‘But don’t be too feminine or you won’t be taken seriously. But also make sure you lean into your femininity. But not too much, just in case because you don’t want to insult anyone.’ It’s like this constant merry-goround of conflicting thoughts at every turn.
“Gender bias is there whether we see it or not, whether people want to acknowledge it or not. Certainly for women in the industry. And I fought for a very long time, because of my background in performing arts, against that whole, ‘You have to strip away your femininity in order to be considered credible and qualified for your job’ thinking.”
February’s Super Bowl in Miami was an important time for Acosta-Ruiz.
Super Bowl week was basically an audition in front of network executives. And then, on Super Bowl eve, her boyfriend of nearly eight years, David Ruiz, proposed.
“He did it in front of the AmericanAirlines Arena, which is where we met seven-and-half years prior at a Miami Heat game,” Acosta-Ruiz says. “So it was a full circle moment in more ways than I can explain. It put a cherry on top of Super Bowl week.”
Ruiz was in the United States Marine Corps when the couple met and he spent much of their early relationship deployed overseas. Now he’s the San Francisco Giants security manager and the guy who eloped with MJ Acosta-Ruiz on
Aug. 26.
“It all came at once,” she says. “I do not recommend moving from one city to another, starting a new job role, and planning a wedding at the same time. But it certainly worked out for us very well.”
Yes, an overnight success … a decade in the making.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND MOVING FROM ONE CITY TO ANOTHER, STARTING A NEW JOB ROLE, AND PLANNING A WEDDING AT THE SAME TIME.