Credit: ABC/ESPN
By Drew Lerner on

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In what was one of the most highly anticipated regular-season college football games in recent memory, ESPN failed to capture one of the most-anticipated moments of the broadcast for viewers.

After LSU’s second-half comeback effort against Ole Miss fell short on Saturday night, all eyes turned to head coach Lane Kiffin, returning to his former school less than a year after leaving them high and dry before their first-ever playoff appearance. The week leading up to Kiffin’s return was contentious as expected, and the Oxford crowd certainly let him hear it throughout the day on Saturday, starting with his remote appearance on College GameDay and rolling all the way through kickoff in primetime.

To ESPN’s credit, its coverage of Kiffin’s return on Saturday was thorough. The network readily acknowledged he was far and away the top storyline in a game featuring two top-10 teams. But fans took notice of one key blunder from ESPN’s broadcast in the moments after LSU fell to Ole Miss in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Nowhere to be seen was the postgame handshake between Kiffin and his former assistant turned Rebels head coach Pete Golding.

In the immediate aftermath, some speculated this was because a handshake didn’t happen. Kiffin, after all, was given a hefty security detail, and it would’ve been wise to brisk him off the field after the game ended to ensure his safety. But footage posted to ESPN’s social media pages that night showed that a handshake did, in fact, happen. It was simply missed by the television broadcast.

As the game clock wound down to 0:00, ESPN’s lead play-by-play commentator Chris Fowler can be heard saying the “two head coaches make their way towards each other,” but the telecast then cuts to Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss celebrating with fans in the stands.

By the time the broadcast refocused on Kiffin, he had already met with Golding at midfield, and fans were upset that the broadcast missed such a key moment.

While it’s unfair to expect networks to bat 1.000, the postgame handshake is one of the few moments in each football broadcast that networks can actually anticipate with 100% certainty and prepare for. ESPN must have known the postgame scrum would be chaotic, and they should’ve had a plan in place with multiple contingencies to capture the handshake no matter what happened.

So how could ESPN miss it? Well, a network source tells Awful Announcing that the crew was prepared for the Ole Miss crowd to storm the field following the game. In those situations, it’s network protocol not to send a handheld camera operator and utility crew onto the field for safety reasons. Instead, the network uses a fixed camera from up in the stands to catch the postgame handshake. On Saturday, that camera could only capture an image of Kiffin, not Golding, due to the swarm of people around the two coaches, so the decision was made not to take the shot. The field-level video posted to social media was captured by someone on ESPN’s social team.

Ultimately, it’s these split-second decisions that separate a good broadcast from a great broadcast. If ESPN was relying on only one camera operator to capture such a high-leverage moment, it always ran the risk of having an unusable shot.

Given the importance of that interaction to the overarching story, it was a significant miss by ESPN, and one that hopefully won’t be repeated during similar circumstances down the line.

About Drew Lerner

Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.

View all posts by Drew Lerner