Chris Fowler is echoing his college football broadcast partner, Kirk Herbstreit, when asked about the NFL. Both are adamant that they love being on Disney’s top college football broadcast, but in an interview with The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch published on Monday, Fowler says he would be happy to do more NFL games in the future.
“It interests me in that I love football and that I always have. I have preferred college over the NFL throughout my career as I have much more experience doing it,” Fowler told Deitsch. “But I have always been a fan of the NFL, and it is football at the highest level. There are a lot of things about it that intrigue me. But that doesn’t mean I am going to take over Monday Night Football. Because I didn’t. I am very happy doing what I am doing. I am living the dream. The NFL is a massively important property to my company – the most important. So the landscape ahead may change and there may be opportunities and I would never close myself to any opportunity, especially one that is really rewarding and fun.”
Two weeks ago, Brian Giuffra of The Big Lead spoke with Kirk Herbstreit, who admitted that he “had an absolute ball” and “was blown away” by how much he enjoyed calling NFL games.
In a column for The Big Lead on Monday, Giuffra wrote that the two statements taken together along with ESPN’s future plans for the NFL seem significant.
“The end of that statement, when paired with the change in tenor from Herbstreit and Andrew Marchand’s report that Disney/ESPN are trying to steal Sunday Night Football away from NBC, is a significant indicator to me that Herbstreit and Fowler are, at minimum, positioning themselves to be the future face of ESPN’s NFL coverage.”
ESPN has struggled to find consistency in the Monday Night Football booth in recent years. It is possible Fowler, Herbstreit and ESPN envision a future with the top college football play-by-play team pulling double duty each week even if the network doesn’t add any other NFL inventory.
