The 12-team College Football Playoff is officially set. And ESPN has revealed who will be calling the games.
Per a press release issued by the network on Sunday, ESPN’s lead college football broadcast crew of Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, and Holly Rowe will call four games throughout the College Football Playoff; one in each round including the National Championship game. That crew will open up their playoff run by calling Tennessee-Ohio State in the first round. Then, they will fly west to the Rose Bowl where they’ll call the winner of Tennessee-Ohio State against the No. 1 overall seed Oregon in the quarterfinals.
ESPN’s No. 2 team of Sean McDonough, Greg McElroy, and Molly McGrath will call the first ever game of the expanded playoff, a Friday night matchup between Notre Dame and Indiana from South Bend, Indiana. Notably, that will be the first time a network other than NBC will broadcast a Notre Dame home game since 1990. Then, the McDonough team will call the winner of the all-Indiana affair against Georgia in the quarterfinal round at the Sugar Bowl.
The two first round games that ESPN sublicensed to TNT will also be called by ESPN crews. Mark Jones, Roddy Jones, and Quint Kessenich will be on the call for SMU and Penn State, a game that will compete directly with the Houston Texans-Kansas City Chiefs NFL game on NBC.
Dave Pasch, Dusty Dvoracek, and Taylor McGregor will take care of Clemson-Texas later that afternoon, a game that will compete with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens on Fox. Those two broadcast crews will be one-and-done during the CFP, as two other ESPN teams will slide in during the quarterfinal round.
The first quarterfinal game at the Fiesta Bowl will feature Boise State against the winner of SMU-Penn State. Bob Wischusen, Louis Riddick, and Kris Budden will have the call for the New Years Eve game.
The last quarterfinal to be accounted for is the Peach Bowl where Arizona State will take on the winner of Clemson-Texas. That game will be called by Joe Tessitore, Jesse Palmer, and Katie George.
ESPN has left open who will call which semifinal game, though the Fowler-Herbstreit team will take one, with the McDonough-McElroy duo presumably taking the other.
Sideline reporters Laura Rutledge and Katie George will each receive an assignment during the semifinal round, while Molly McGrath will cover one of the sidelines alongside Holly Rowe during the National Championship.
It’s certainly notable that ESPN has decided to deploy six teams rather than four for the CFP. The network could have easily allowed the Wischusen-led team and the Tessitore-led team to also call first round games on TNT. Instead, they tapped the Jones and Pasch teams who generally take assignments that are a bit further down the pecking order during the regular season. It’s great to see those teams receive some deserved recognition in the form of calling a playoff game, but it also seems like ESPN didn’t want to give TNT its best guys.
No matter the reasoning, the division of labor is set. And now we know who will be calling college football’s new postseason.
[ESPN PR]
