Seattle Sports host Brock Huard will be blazing a trail in the Pacific Northwest this weekend with his FOX college football obligations, something he told NBC’s Mike Tirico he feels is incredibly unique.
Huard will begin in Eugene, Oregon on Friday evening on the call for the annual “Civil War” game between No. 6 Oregon and No. 16 Oregon State. When that game is finished, he’ll get on a bus and make the nearly 300-mile trip north home to Seattle to call the Apple Cup game between Washington State and No. 4 Washington on Saturday afternoon.
“Our producer said, and you’ve got a history. You know these things,” Huard said to Tirico, who was a guest on Brock & Salk on Tuesday. “You (Syracuse) Orange guys just have the answers to this. But he said on our production meeting call yesterday we’re gonna do something that he doesn’t think has ever been done in TV history.”
Huard explained doing the two games in less than 24 hours, in two different states before Tirico praised him for taking on such a daunting task.
Co-host Mike Salk wondered if that wasn’t something Tirico had already done considering his experience in calling multiple sports. Mike, who will be calling three games in eight days between Vikings/Broncos this past Sunday night, Seahawks/49ers on Thanksgiving night, and Ravens/Chargers this Sunday night, joked that he had done something similar to what Huard is doing and didn’t want to rain on Brock’s parade right then.
“I just wanted to let Brock have his moment,” Tirico said to laughs from both Huard and Salk.
Mike recalled a particularly busy stretch of work he did when he was still at ESPN, first calling a West Virginia football game one night before ending up in Colorado the next day.
“I went from Morgantown, West Virginia and did a 2:30 PM Nebraska/Colorado game where the quarterbacks in the Nebraska/Colorado game in Boulder were Joel Klatt and Bengals head coach Zac Taylor,” he said. “So I had my two in about the exact same time window as Brock, although Brock’s performance will be better, and then I did The Skins Game golf that weekend — Saturday/Sunday in the desert in California. And then Monday Night Countdown. That was my hardest weekend of work in my life by far.”
“I’ll never do that again,” Tirico added. “It was completely stupid.”
But how soon Tirico forgets. Just last year, he took on the incredibly difficult task of hosting the first few days of NBC primetime Winter Olympic coverage in Beijing, then flew across the globe to Stamford, Connecticut to continue Olympic obligations before landing in Los Angeles where he hosted NBC’s pre-game coverage of Super Bowl LVI.
Tirico hosted primetime Olympic coverage later that same night in LA. He was supposed to return to China after the Super Bowl to finish Olympic coverage on location, but the network decided against it.
Still, Tirico found it impressive that Huard will be grinding like he will this weekend. Huard credited the production folks who will work virtually 48 hours straight to grind even harder.
“Our crew are the heroes,” Huard said. “As difficult as it is for us on the air, those men and women behind the scenes make the whole thing go.”
