Two days before college football is scheduled to crown a national champion, the sport’s lead broadcast team will be working a late season NFL game.
ESPN announced Tuesday that Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit will work one of the two games in the network’s scheduled Week 18 NFL doubleheaader, marking the second-straight year that the college football pairing has worked an NFL game. The duo called ESPN’s season-opening Steelers-Giants game last season, back when ESPN still aired a doubleheader in Week 1.
No games have been assigned yet, so it is obviously not clear which game Fowler and Herbstreit will call. As part of Disney’s new NFL media rights deal, the Week 18 doubleheader — which will be simulcast on ABC and ESPN+ — will consist of games with playoff implications.
The NFL assignment is part of a particularly busy stretch for Fowler and Herbstreit, who are set to call the Orange Bowl and Rose Bowl on consecutive days, followed by the NFL and CFP National Championship two days apart the following weekend.
There were persistent rumors last year that Fowler and Herbstreit would work Monday Night Football full-time in the event the college football season was not played. In addition to calling the Steelers-Giants opener, the duo was nearly assigned a Broncos-Patriots make-up game that was briefly scheduled for ESPN before being postponed a second time.
Fowler and Herbstreit will be joined on the sidelines by NFL Live host Laura Rutledge.
[News from ESPN PR]
