Sean McDonough wasn’t always proud of his iconic ‘trouble with the snap’ call

Michigan may have had trouble with the snap, but Sean McDonough had trouble with the call.

It’s been over a decade now since McDonough’s voice cracked, as Michigan punter Blake O’Neill fumbled a snap and Jalen Watts-Jackson scooped it up to give the Spartans an improbable 27-23 win as the clock hit double zeroes. But it took nearly that amount of time for McDonough to grow comfortable with a call that’s become synonymous with one of the great regular season endings in recent college football memory.

As he explained to Brandon Walker on the Barstool Sports personality’s newly minted eponymous college football show, he wasn’t always proud of the call that will forever scratch a certain itch in the brains of many Michigan State fans. In fact, he used the word “embarrassing,” as he recounted the particular voice crack that still follows him to this very day.

Whether it’s calling Sid Bream’s dramatic game-winning slide at home plate in Game 7 of the 1992 National League Championship Series to send the Atlanta Braves to the World Series or the Michigan-Michigan State ending a generation later, voice cracks have followed McDonough throughout his illustrious career. And while it’s become an endearing part of his reputation as a broadcaster, it clearly resonates more with the Awful Announcing’s and the Brandon Walker’s of the world than it does with ESPN’s No. 2 college football voice.

He’s come to accept it, though, somewhat.

“I think first of all, you know, it’s involuntary, obviously,” he told Walker. “I guess it was just kind of embarrassing at the beginning. You think your voice isn’t really supposed to do that. And then, I think if anything, it helps maybe punctuate some of those big moments. I think this was the 10-year anniversary last fall of that Michigan-Michigan State game and particularly the ending that everybody remembers, and several outlets did a long piece about it. The Athletic did, and they had the perspective of people who were involved in the play on both sides: coaches, players, announcers, and other people. And Mark Dantonio, the Michigan State coach at the time, he thinks the reason it’s remembered as much as it is is the call and the voice crack and the surrender Cobra guy in the Michigan student section.

“So, that’s probably when I stopped being embarrassed about it,” McDonough concluded. “If it helps people remember those plays, if it makes it seem, as big as it was, because that’s one of the still one of the most memorable endings in the history of college football, then so be it.”

Sean McDonough recalls what went into his iconic call of Michigan’s “Trouble With The Snap” pic.twitter.com/B6dOU9nt5L

— Brandon Walker College Football Show (@BFWshow) August 21, 2026

McDonough seems to have made his peace with it, even if he doesn’t count it among the calls he’s proudest of on a technical level.

“I always tell aspiring play-by-play people, your call should match the moment, the magnitude of the moment,” McDonough told The Athletic in the same anniversary retrospective last year. “In real time on that call, I was kind of embarrassed, ‘Oh my gosh, my voice is cracking like I’m a 12-year-old going through puberty.’ But in hindsight, that helped people remember it.”