Aug 29, 2024; Boulder, Colorado, USA; Detail view of a ESPN college football emblem on a end zone broadcast camera during the first half between the North Dakota State Bison against the Colorado Buffaloes at Folsom Field. Mandatory Credit: Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports Credit: Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

The 2024 college football season has seen many changes. This is the first year of a 12-team playoff, the first year for many teams in new conferences, the start of several broadcast deals, and the initial year together for several broadcast booths.

With the regular season wrapping up this week and conference championship week ahead, this seems like a good time to ask AA readers to evaluate some of the top booths.

As with all of our announcer rankings (CFB last season, NFL, CBB, MLB, 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 the play-by-play announcer’s last name and with network assignments in parentheses, and ask you to grade those teams individually from A to F. A is the best grade and F is the worst.

Grade as few or as many teams as you desire. 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.

It’s worth mentioning a couple of notes on which teams were selected for inclusion in this poll. These rankings are tough for college football because there are so many games each week and announcers involved, and not all teams are consistent.

ESPN’s start-of-season release mentioned 26 teams across their networks (including ABC, SEC Network, ACC Network, and all the ESPN networks), and that’s before counting ESPN+ announcers. Meanwhile, Fox listed seven teams in Week 1 and often has up to nine across Fox and FS1 in a given week, to say nothing of BTN (where they have the majority stake). CBS mixes and matches announcers more, especially on CBSSN, but they’re often broadcasting at least six games a week, while NBC sometimes has four or five games, The CW usually has at least two, and TNT Sports often has one to two on truTV/Max.

To keep this somewhat manageable for voters, we went with a top 25 list (up from 20 last year and corresponding with the AP Top 25, the CFP rankings, and the USA Today coaches poll). That features around half the teams from most networks while making sure to include at least one for each league network and smaller network.

Most of the networks list their announcing teams in at least a rough order of internal prominence, so decisions were based on that to start with. Beyond that, decisions were based on team consistency (how often they worked together, as seen in our weekly announcing schedules), and then on the profile of games they called. We had a rule of one listing per announcer: a few announcers here work with some different partners, but we tried to go with their most common pairing. We also tried to list their most common network or networks.

Without further ado, here’s the voting form (again, also available here). The form will be open through 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT on Wednesday, Dec. 4. The rankings will be announced here on Thursday, Dec. 5.

Thanks for voting! Check back here for the rankings on Thursday, Dec. 5.

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.