Depth on the bench and desks in many places. No, this isn’t a commercial for furniture makers or hardware stores — it’s a tidy way to summarize why ESPN is best equipped to cover the College Football Playoff and the New Year’s Six bowl games on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
When comparing ESPN to CBS/CBSSN, FOX/FS1, and NBC/NBCSN, there’s zero doubt that ESPN’s stable of announce crews exceeded anything other network collectives could have offered. On a separate but related level, the reach and resources of SportsCenter were able to put anchor desks in both Pasadena (Rose Bowl) and New Orleans (Sugar Bowl), capped by a live SportsCenter broadcast co-hosted by Steve Levy and John Buccigross on the Superdome field just after Ohio State’s Sugar Bowl takedown of Alabama on New Year’s night. In the realms of both live-game announcing and anchor-desk coverage (pregame and postgame), ESPN provided coverage of the playoff and the New Year’s Six which other operations wouldn’t have been able to match.
We can talk about ESPN’s hypersaturation coverage and the worrisome dynamics it sometimes creates. We can talk about pushing certain ideas to the diminishment or exclusion of others. We can discuss the polarizing personalities in the ESPN tent, ones that lend a First Take-like flavor to college football discussions, which is never a good thing. However, those conversations are all separate from this one. For all the ways in which you might not like ESPN, it’s the WorldWide Leader for a number of reasons, and some of them are actually (still) good.
This is one of them.
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Pray tell, what other outlet would have been able to put a broadcasting star, Rece Davis, in Pasadena; place the respected John Saunders in New Orleans; slot Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit into the Rose Bowl announcing booth; and have an announcer of Brad Nessler’s caliber call the Sugar Bowl with Todd Blackledge? (Yes, Brent Musburger should have done one of these games, but that’s also a different conversation.)
There is no other answer. Only ESPN could have realistically done this.
CBS has Verne and Gary. After that, the network’s “SEC B-crew” would have been the next most likely option for calling a playoff semifinal, and that would not have gone over well with viewers.
NBC has the main Notre Dame broadcasting team of Dan Hicks, Doug Flutie, and Mike Mayock. Rolling with this hypothetical for a moment, consider a world in which NBC owned the rights to the playoff. Much as the ABC Monday Night Football crew used to call the Sugar Bowl roughly a quarter of a century ago, the Peacock might have considered Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth as its second announce crew for the playoff semifinals. That sounds nice in theory, but Michaels and Collinsworth are so immersed in the pro game that giving them a semifinal would have been a lot like putting the NBA on TNT crew on NCAA tournament duty. The move just wouldn’t have worked, and a great many college football fans wouldn’t have liked it.
FOX has Gus Johnson and Charles Davis as one crew, Tim Brando and Joel Klatt as another. That comes closest to what ESPN did for the semifinals… but it still doesn’t rise to the caliber of broadcaster the WWL was able to provide.
Moreover — and here’s a key point of separation between ESPN and the rest — the New Year’s Six exposes the thin benches at non-ESPN outlets.
Where would FOX have been able to get four announce crews for the other New Year’s Six games? What about CBS? It would have raided the CBS Sports Network pantry and been forced to trot out second-rate crews. NBC and NBC Sports Network don’t cover enough major college football games outside of Notre Dame. There aren’t enough hands on deck to cover the New Year’s Six.
ESPN had Sean McDonough and Chris Spielman — arguably the best crew at the entire network — on the Boise State-Arizona Fiesta Bowl, the least sexy national matchup in the New Year’s Six collection. That detail right there tells you a lot about the resources ESPN could bring to college football’s new top-tier bowl setup. Musburger was allowed to call his first-ever Orange Bowl on New Year’s Eve night. When McDonough and Musburger are calling the appetizers on your New Year’s Six menu — and Dave Pasch and Joe Tessitore round out the lineup with the Cotton and Peach Bowls, respectively — you’re well ahead of the competition.
As for multiple anchor desks and live SportsCenter broadcasts, the fundamental reality which separates ESPN from others is simply this: One could readily imagine FS1, CBS and NBC having one main anchor desk in one of the two College Football Playoff cities. Jay and Dan (FS1) or Adam Zucker (CBS/CBSSN) would have held down the fort in one city. In yet another hypothetical, NBC — similar to what was outlined above with Michaels/Collinsworth calling a playoff semifinal — could have had Bob Costas perhaps make an anchor-desk appearance in one city, while Liam McHugh of the Notre Dame crew could have made his way to the other semifinal location. Yet, as is the case with Michaels/Collinsworth, Costas is so immersed in the NFL that a commitment to college football just doesn’t come across as realistic.
ESPN offers dedicated college football announcers and on-site SportsCenter coverage that stretch far beyond the bounds of what other networks could have brought to the table. You might be debating today whether Oregon or Ohio State will win the national championship, but there’s really no debate that ESPN, for all its other flaws, is the broadcast organization best suited to cover the College Football Playoff and the New Year’s Six bowl games.
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