Jon Anik has spent over a decade as the UFC’s lead play-by-play voice. He’s called some of the biggest fights in the promotion’s history. He works alongside Joe Rogan and Daniel Cormier. The job is exactly what he signed up for.
It’s also not the job he’s been chasing since childhood.
Anik appeared on Zach Gelb’s new show for 365 Sports and Rogue Media Network this week and laid out something he’s been dancing around for years. He wants to call football. Not just any football, but professional football. The dream that got him into broadcasting in the first place hasn’t gone anywhere just because he found success in combat sports.
“American football has always been the dream for me,” Anik said. “I don’t know that I’d ever be able to fully get the NFL dream out of my system. I have the job that I want right now, but I would be telling a bald-faced lie if I said I didn’t feel that tug to call an NFL football game, or call an NFL season before it’s all said and done.”
Jon Anik loves calling the UFC, but makes it clear calling football games is his dream.
Give me @Jon_Anik in either a college or NFL booth!
— Zach Gelb (@ZachGelb) January 20, 2026
Anik’s path into broadcasting started in Massachusetts. Before he ever called a UFC fight, before he worked at ESPN, he was just a kid in the stands.
“Growing up with the NFL sort of being the fabric of my family and going to New England Patriots games in the 1980’s and ’90s when they were the laughing stock of the NFL, and now seeing where the league is, football’s in my DNA,” Anik said. “Just like fighting’s in all of our DNA.”
Anik hasn’t been completely shut out of football. He called one college game in 2015, four years after leaving ESPN to become the UFC’s lead voice. Arizona traveled to Washington that November. Rich Rodriguez was in his third season, trying to turn around the Wildcats. Chris Petersen was in his second year rebuilding the Huskies after leaving Boise State
“The last time I called a college football game was 2015, it was Arizona at Washington,” Anik explained. “And thankfully for me, because I hadn’t called a college football game since I’d been at ESPN in 2011, it was 49-3. Because going in, I was thinking ‘Man, if this game’s close, I’m really gonna be challenged.'”
College football would require a completely different rhythm than what Anik has built in the UFC.
“That would be fun, and I would absolutely welcome that challenge,” he continued. “Even though our UFC schedule is pretty intensive and no live event is as long as ours, that would be an interesting challenge going 12 straight weeks because that’s not my reality right now, and that has its own set of challenges.”
This isn’t the first time Anik has publicly wrestled with his future in combat sports. In early 2024, he went off on MMA fans for the negativity they directed at him after close fights. He said he was growing tired of the MMA space and the “morass of negativity” that follows every controversial decision. He suggested he might leave by 2026 because he’d “had it” with the malice and disrespect.
“I do think you get to a certain point in life where maybe you don’t want to stay too long and maybe get out at the right time,” Anik said. “But yeah, I do think I have some professional desires beyond the UFC, but right now, as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m trying to earn that seat every show out, and that’s my initiative at UFC 324.”
Anik isn’t checking out of the UFC. But the football dream hasn’t disappeared. It’s been there since he was a kid watching terrible Patriots teams with his family. It’s still there now that he’s 45 and wondering how much time he has left to chase it.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.