On September 13, Steve Levy, Brian Griese, and Louis Riddick will begin their second year of calling Monday Night Football games for ESPN. Their first year working as a trio brought a lot of challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic, calling games with no fans, and being a three-man booth calling games.
Griese and Levy were guests on the most recent episode of The Dave Pasch Podcast (Riddick will be on a separate episode). Pasch used to call college football games with Griese on ESPN. While there were many challenges to calling games last season, Levy mentioned that working with Griese previously on college football helped get past a lot of those obstacles.
“I was really fortunate that I wasn’t starting from scratch with Brian. That might have been too much. New producer, new director, three in the booth which can be tricky, has its own sort of issues. In a year where you are not laying out for crowd noise, that was the season to have three voices…We tried to make it as good as possible and we knew we were going to be judged by whatever was coming through the TV screen and the speakers. We were comfortable being judged by that”
Levy took the listener inside the booth. Last year required real adaptation on the part of the three broadcasters. Levy said there were fewer people next to him than ever before.
“We replaced people in the booth with monitors. In an effort to keep your six feet distance, no spotter standing next to us, there was a monitor, the spotter was in another booth. No statistician. Instead of the statistician, we had another monitor in front of us. You got to see the manicure of whoever was pointing to a place in the booth with their own camera. We didn’t know what to go off of.”
One of the highlights of last season for Levy was in Week 3 when ESPN had the Chiefs-Ravens game. Levy says one tweet from Patrick Mahomes’ mother helped the trio loosen up. It also helped break the ice between them.
After Riddick had called Patrick Mahomes “Pat Mahomes” for most of the night, Mahomes’s mother tweeted “his name is Patrick.”
“We’re in the break and it’s being revealed to us on social media that Patrick’s mom is saying all this stuff and I’m like guys, we’ve got to throw it up on the screen…Louis got hysterical. It loosened everybody up. It’s moments like that. I thought that was a really good jumping-off point for the three of us in the booth.”
Year 2 for Levy, Griese, and Riddick begins on Monday, September 13 when the Baltimore Ravens head to Las Vegas to take on the Raiders (8:15 PM ET).
