Technical difficulties for the Auburn-Kentucky broadcast on ABC on March 1, 2025. Technical difficulties for the Auburn-Kentucky broadcast on ABC on March 1, 2025. (Awful Announcing on X.)
ABCCollege BasketballESPNBy Andrew Bucholtz on

Saturday saw a highly-anticipated men’s college basketball clash, with the No. 1 Auburn Tigers on the road against the No. 17 Kentucky Wildcats. Unfortunately, though, those who were watching it on ABC missed the last 12 minutes of game time, and did so in quite an odd fashion. The ESPN on ABC broadcast suddenly lost both picture and audio with 12:26 left in the second half, going to a blue screen and then a commercial break:

After around seven minutes of commercials, a studio update included “For those of you watching on ABC, they’re having technical difficulties inside Rupp Arena. We want to let you know, you will see Texas Tech and Kansas until they get things figured out here, the game that’s playing out right now over on ESPN.”

However, the broadcast didn’t actually go to that other college basketball game. Instead, it went to pregame for a planned Boston Bruins-Pittsburgh Penguins NHL game that was supposed to follow Auburn-Kentucky (with a 3 p.m. ET start). And then that game started:

As per Matt Jones of Kentucky Sports Radio, the initial problem here came from a “major technical issue” with the truck ABC was using at the Kentucky game:

ESPN also eventually delivered a social media update on switching to the NHL game:

And they noted the Auburn-Kentucky game would finish on ESPNEWS, but only right before it ended:

The broadcast had indeed resumed there a few minutes earlier, with just 2:23 left on the game clock, and with play-by-play voice Dan Shulman saying a generator caught fire.

Of course, viewers who were looking to catch this on ABC didn’t miss anything actually decisive in terms of the outcome of this specific game. Auburn was up 68-52 when the feed crashed, and the Tigers maintained that lead for the rest of the game, eventually winning comfortably, 94-78. And their domination led to a lot of jokes about the feed crash:

Update: ESPN sent out this statement on the issue:

“In a freak accident, a generator at Rupp Arena caught on fire causing us to lose power and be knocked off the air as a result. Thankfully, no one was harmed on-site. We apologize that fans watching on ABC were impacted for a period of the second half.”

Technical difficulties and feed issues do, of course, happen, and an on-fire generator is certainly significant. But the truck issue here was still brutal for those who were looking to watch this specific game.

And this was a missed historic moment. The Tigers hadn’t won at Rupp since a 53-52 win over the then-No. 1 Wildcats in 1988, and hadn’t beat Kentucky at all since 2022, so it’s unfortunate that their fans didn’t get to savor this. And the ESPN/ABC handling of it, with such a long delay before any update, then an unfulfilled promise to go to the other CBB game, and then a switch to the NHL game and a brief finish to this one on ESPNEWS, certainly wasn’t ideal.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz