ESPN broadcasted one of the biggest game of the college football season on Saturday as Alabama hosted Georgia. The broadcast began with a frantic technical situation that Chris Fowler detailed to Dan Patrick on Monday.
During an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show, Fowler was asked if he had ever broadcast a game where the crowd was so loud he couldn’t hear analyst Kirk Herbstreit.
“We couldn’t hear ourselves Saturday night because we were having a technical problem. I don’t think you mean that,” Fowler revealed. “We had a power generator die on us. I mean, the crew did an amazing job. The generators, you rely on that. Could have been a disaster, like no broadcast. One dies and they bring in the backup (College) GameDay generator with a police escort. They get into the stadium and everything is computerized.
“Imagine a laptop dies and it doesn’t shut down properly. You gotta bring it back to life. Well, now that’s times a million with these electronic trucks. So we got up and running, but no, we could not hear ourselves in the open. For example, your mic just kind of goes out.”
To answer the original question from Dan Patrick, Chris Fowler said the atmosphere at Alabama Saturday evening was certainly one to remember.
“The crowd noise was as loud as I’d heard it in Alabama, which is not, I would say, one of the loudest places on earth for football,” he said. “It’s a huge place, but it’s only the fifth biggest stadium in the SEC and it’s not known for being, I don’t think it’s one of the loudest, but they were on hand, you can use pandemonium in there with 28 nothing and again at the end the last play, so I hope we can be heard on the air. We get that complaint sometimes ‘the crowd was too loud,’ but I just screaming as loud as they possibly could some of those last calls.”
