Before he becomes the voice of Major League Baseball on NBC, Jason Benetti will be making an unexpected debut on CBS/TNT Sports’ NCAA Tournament coverage.
Andrew Marchand of The Athletic reported Wednesday that Benetti will fill in for Brian Anderson on Thursday’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament games. Anderson sounded under the weather throughout Tuesday’s First Four game between NC State and Texas, which he broadcast as part of a special three-man booth with Dick Vitale and Charles Barkley.
Per Marchand, Anderson hopes to return Saturday.
Benetti, who officially joined NBC earlier this month to become the network’s lead Major League Baseball voice, was already set to cover the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for Westwood One radio. He will be replacing Anderson alongside analyst Jim Jackson and sideline reporter Allie LaForce on games from Buffalo, NY — an afternoon TNT doubleheader of South Florida-Louisville and North Dakota State-Michigan State and a primetime CBS doubleheader of Howard-Michigan and Saint Louis-Georgia.
For Anderson, it is a bit of a full-circle moment. In 2015, he filled in for an ill Marv Albert on a high-profile Elite Eight game pitting undefeated Kentucky against Notre Dame. After Albert dropped his tournament duties the following year, it was Anderson who replaced him as #2 on the CBS/Turner Sports depth chart — a position he has held ever since.
But there would seem to be little danger of Anderson being ‘Wally Pipped’ by Benetti, who will be working a game on CBS/TNT Sports for the first time — and presumably the last for the foreseeable future. Benetti is about to begin the highest-profile national role of his career with NBC Sports, and there is no reason to believe that will include regularly moonlighting for other networks.
Benetti will now end up having called games for three of the four broadcast networks in just two months’ time — regular season college basketball for FOX as recently as last month, tournament games for CBS on Thursday, and MLB Opening Night for NBC a week from Thursday. It is hard to imagine that any other broadcaster has worked games for three different broadcast networks in such a short amount of time, though that would be hard to verify.
