The men’s college basketball regular season is wrapping up, and the conference tournaments are under way. To celebrate, we want your opinions on how some of the national announcing teams from this season stack up.
As with all of our rankings (announcers for NFL, CFB, MLB, NBA, WNBA, NHL, and more), the bottom of this post will contain a form to vote (also available here). The form will feature a list of announcing teams, presented alphabetically by network, and then by the play-by-play announcer’s last name. It will ask you to grade those teams individually from A to F. A is the best grade and F is the worst.
You can grade as few or as many teams as you desire, and you can Control-F to find a team you’re particularly interested in voting for. Once you’ve selected your grades, submit them. Feel free to add comments or explanations for your grades as well, but it’s not required. All votes and comments are anonymous, and email addresses are not collected.
Picking announcing teams to evaluate here was not easy, as there are a ton of college basketball games (more than 4,200 on ESPN platforms alone this season), and a lot of different people calling them. Many of those people work with several different partners week-to-week. We settled on 20 of the most-prominent pairings from across CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC, and TNT broadcasts this regular season, but this is just a fraction of the people announcing games, and just a small amount of the pairings we’ve seen.
Note that this doesn’t include the specific CBS Sports and TNT Sports’ NCAA Tournament announcing teams: we plan to run a separate poll for them ahead of the Final Four. Two other particular notes on inclusion: we included the team of Dave O’Brien, Dick Vitale and Cory Alexander despite Vitale only returning to the ESPN airwaves in February after years away due to health issues because we’re curious on how readers found that booth, and we included Gus Johnson and Bill Raftery twice each due to their prominent pairings.
The voting form is below, and also here. It will be open through 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT on Tuesday, March 11. The rankings will be announced at Awful Announcing on Thursday, March 13.
Thanks for voting!
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.