The ESPN broadcast of Saturday night’s USC-Utah game lost its cameras with 4:47 remaining in the third quarter, before the broadcast finally returned to normal with one minute remaining in the quarter. This would make for a difficult situation on any broadcast, but especially when announcers are calling the game remotely — due to the pandemic — as ESPN’s Dave Flemming and Rod Gilmore were in this one.
A technical difficulties graphic popped up on the screen out of the commercial break, and Flemming said, “We are experiencing some technical difficulties. We lost our cameras, which, Rod, it is hard to televise a football game without cameras. So we’re working on it.”
ESPN has lost their cameras for the USC-Utah game. pic.twitter.com/hJn4sW4Ddo
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 22, 2020
Flemming and Gilmore then improvised, and basically turned it into a radio broadcast while reading play-by-play off of a gamecast. This is some serious dedication to the craft:
USC-Utah has basically turned into a radio broadcast on ESPN. pic.twitter.com/X2ZpBV1Ag5
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 22, 2020
Dave Flemming is seemingly just doing play-by-play by the gamecast.
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 22, 2020
https://twitter.com/BarrettSallee/status/1330390875730567174
And here’s the return to televised game action:
The USC-Utah TV broadcast is back on ESPN after missing a USC series on offense. pic.twitter.com/09lfeABvY1
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 22, 2020
The good news is that there were no scoring plays missed while the cameras were out.
But everything about this incident summarizes both 2020 and Pac-12 After Dark quite well.
About Matt Clapp
Matt is an editor/writer at The Comeback and Awful Announcing.
He can be reached by email at mclapp@thecomeback.com.