If you’re anything like me, the most exciting time of the year is the first week of September. A new season of football is set to begin, all of your high stakes fantasy leagues have been chosen and set, and you’re ready to start fresh with an entirely new slew of games, teams, players and rosters to tinker with while you watch in intense anticipation. Absolutely nothing is better than relaxing into your reclining chair to sit like a lump for 10 hours every Sunday and experience the greatest past time in the history of the United States. The NFL, recognizing that the US is a nation of gambling degenerates, has even been so thoughtful to throw us all a bone on Monday and Thursday nights so we can waste even more time in watching our favorite sport get beamed into our veins like the electric mainline of adrenaline that it is. The NFL has full control over our being, irregardless of our political affiliations, backgrounds, religions (or lack thereof) and opinions as we know them. Football is the one exception to all of the rules otherwise set forth in our society — the one time we can all come together and be slaves to the gigantic machine that we’re all hopelessly subservient to.
Every year I go through the same ritual: I get super excited about football season, I draft all of my high-stakes fantasy leagues with the NFFC, I turn on the TV to watch initial games, and I am instantly reminded of what a clueless tool I really am. You see, the NFL gives absolutely zero fucks about what you really want. Never mind that you’re subscribing to RedZone and NFLplus, and Sunday Ticket and all the other shit you think you need to track all of your fantasy team’s points. The NFL knows you’re addicted, like a toothless junkie searching for another score, doing whatever it takes to feed the bloated beast that pays so many inflated salaries. The NFL knows they’ve got you right where they want you. So what do they do? They bludgeon you with a constant barrage of unwatchable commercials, all of which are more empty and unfunny than the next, all in an attempt to part you with your money as they march down a shameless avenue of money-grubbing whoredom. Players, actors, directors, you name it — they all want your money and they don’t care how epically boring and mediocre they have to be to get it. It’s a flaming dumpster fire of commercialization where all pride has been lost, and if you question it, you’re deemed as a fascist and a scumbag. It’s a yearly psychological dichotomy that I wrestle with as I try and enjoy my favorite sport, but also realize that I’m feeding the ugliest machine that has ever existed.
While I exhaust myself with all of this inner turmoil, a collection of guys narrate my struggling psyche: the NFL announcers. For the most part, they all suck. I mean, they’re bad. No one in their right mind would listen to the vast majority of these dopes even in the best of situations, but while we’re feeding our addictions and trying to enjoy the game, these imbeciles are swatting you over the head with their complete lack of words and their self-obsessed diction. These people place themselves into an alternative universe where pretending to care about tiresome and made-up narratives has journalistic weight, and making you believe them is of utmost importance. They get paid to bore the piss out of you, and to be the least-offensive voices you could ever dream of hearing. They over enunciate. They overreact. They engage in small talk chatter that would bore even Troy Aikman. These people get paid big salaries to basically be the most middle-of-the-road piles of flesh and organs you could ever dream of, and we are forced to listen to them. Thank fuck for the mute button — I use it vigorously on game day.
Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, and I’m going to start this list by naming off my 10 favorite NFL announcers. Most of these guys are more or less boring as well, but just a tad less awful than the 10 that will follow. I’m a student of the NFL, have been for over four decades and, of course, I know what I’m talking about. Please scroll past the first 10 entires if you only wish to see my 10 worst announcers:
The 10 Best NFL Announcers
10. Kurt Warner
When Kurt Warner first entered the NFL as a QB for the Rams and dominated the league, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He and his wife made me want to hate them, with their religious nonsense and looking to the heavens after throwing a TD and moving their lips in prayer and all the stupid childish shit that should make us all roll our eyes in fear. But you just had to cheer for the guy. From bagging groceries to Superbowl champion — how do you not love that story? When he tried his hand at announcing, he was just as good. He teams up with Rich Eisen who is even better, and while they only commentate a few games a year it makes you wonder why they don’t do a lot more. Warner is funny, smart, a ball breaker and has a very likable repartee with Eisen that makes listening to a game pretty damn fun.
9. Tim Brando
Brando is an old pro. He’s been around forever, doing all kinds of sports, and I certainly don’t mind listening to his takes and perspectives. He knows his shit and isn’t obsessed with himself which is something that sadly infects most announcers these days.
8. Chris Myers
Another dude that’s been around forever, when he calls a game you feel like he means it. It’s not forced, it’s not fake, it’s not overly enunciated — just an old sports nut who loves watching the game.
7. Mark Sanchez
After clotheslining himself with the ass of his own lineman, Mark Sanchez had a lot to live down. He figured out how to do that by becoming one of the best NFL announcers in the game right now. He’s an ex-player which gives him the cred he needs, and he clearly loves what he does. He’s not a buffoon who obsesses on his diction, but rather delivers the goods by owning a friendly-guy-next-door quality. I look forward to listening to any game he commentates.
6. Rich Eisen
Rich Eisen is an untouchable. He’s liked by everyone for showing emotion on air, knowing his shit and being genuinely funny. He’s worked for all the places that give you street cred and now he gets to dictate where he goes next. He’s a beast in the sports world and it’s arguable that anyone else commands more respect in the realm of athletic journalism. In the years to come, his name will be entered into the GOAT conversation. It’s hard to not like Eisen — he’s been around forever and his love of sports bleeds through. He’s passionate about football, and while he only calls a few games a year with his buddy Kurt Warner (who’s also very good) it’s enough to make you wish he called more. He’s got a great sense of humor in the booth, and compared to most of his contemporaries that’s saying something.
5. Joe Buck
I can’t believe I’m putting Joe Buck at number five, or anywhere else on this list, but something strange happened when Buck moved from Fox to ESPN: he got good. When Buck was at Fox, I thought he was one of the worst orators of all time. From his embarrassing worship of Aaron Rodgers to his cringe-worthy admonishing of Randy Moss faux-flashing his ass to the Packer fans (who deserved it), Buck was the picturesque version of an epic douchebag. Then he went to ESPN, and it was like a new man was born. He showed off a fantastically dry sense of humor. He started enjoying the game he was watching rather than trying to appease the bores of the world. Basically, he loosened up. I always preferred listening to Buck call the World Series, and I still enjoy that, but after years of hating this guy, I’ve changed my tune and enjoy listening to him call NFL games as well. Goes to show how Fox can ruin things.
4. Greg Olsen
Dexter Morgan decided to retire from football and cooly become one of the best NFL commentators of all time. Olsen is an ex-player which makes him legit, but coming with that is his extreme likability, passion and knowledge. Olsen is just a cool guy, and he ‘s much better with words than most of his counterparts that never played a snap in their life. Throw in a great sense of humor, and you’ve got a consistent passion player who never disappoints. And to think they replaced him with Tom Brady — bad move.
3. Kevin Harlan
This guy is simply one of the best to ever do it. All the things you need in a great announcer, this guy has it in spades: energy, humor, a great voice and a deep knowledge of the game. This dude is awesome. Go listen to his play-by-play of the naked streaker at the 49ers/Rams game and tell me I’m wrong.
2. Kenny Albert
What is with the Alberts anyway? These guys were just born to commentate sports. Just like his brother Marv, arguably the greatest NBA announcer of all time, Kenny comes correct with arguably the greatest skills of any NFL announcer in the game today. A great voice, a commanding ownership of the English language, a sense of humor and a deep knowledge and passion of the game. What more could you want? He’s teamed with Jonathan Vilma who deeply divides people, but I like him. I go out of my way to listen to these two, and they make football even more fun to watch.
Honorable mention: Jon Gruden
Coach Gruden doesn’t make the list because he’s no longer commentating in 2025, but damn, I miss this guy. There’s simply no one in football that has the passion this guy possesses, and the sport is worse for not letting him take part. His Monday Night Football pairing with Mike Tirico is the best duo ever (with the possible exception of Howard Cosell and Don Meredith), and I truly hope Gruden wins his legal battle against that turd Roger Goodell and his merry little band of dipshits and crooks. Speaking of Mike Tirico…..
1. Mike Tirico
I mean, come on. Who’s better than this guy? This dude was born to announce games, and it doesn’t matter if he’s calling football, basketball, or baseball — he crushes it. Passion, humor, knowledge, likability…no one keeps all these things in flawless motion like Tirico. It’s a serious shame he can’t work with Gruden any longer, especially since he now works with one of the worst in the business in Cris Collinsworth, but even C.C. can’t derail Tirico’s relentless power in entertaining the masses. Unfortunately, Tirico isn’t able to be at his best working for NBC, but he’s still absolutely the best commentator in the game.
The 10 worst NFL announcers
10. Al Michaels
Like a bad case of the herp, Al Michaels is the bastard that refuses to go away. In a stark refusal to subscribe to the old adage “leave them wanting more”, Michaels subscribes to his own adage of “keep mumbling into the mic until you drop dead on air”. I’m putting Michaels at number 10 because of his standing in the pantheon of all-time great announcers as I believe he definitely is. 70s, 80s and 90s Michaels remains some of the greatest sports announcing of all time, but seriously, someone needs to tell Michaels that we’ve been sniffing his rotten old farts for two decades too long. Know when to go away already! His incessant mumbling and non-sequiturs conjure up images of being lost in an old folks home, and the longer we enable this old timer the more he’s gonna keep filling up his bloated pants with stale shit. Pairing him with Amazon only makes sense in the overall picture of painfully boring analysis, but good lord, stop it already.
9. Tony Romo
Remember when Romo changed NFL announcing? The fresh face that people wanted, where he was clearly the best on TV? The real street-level passion that we loved to hear, and how we reveled in his opening the door for other great announcers who were ex-players, like Greg Olsen? Then remember when he started to suck ass? When he got in trouble for saying something inoffensive, but some yahoo in the midwest complained and he had to issue a public apology? Isn’t it funny how he immediately was terrible after that incident? Romo could obviously be much better, but he chose the low road so he could keep his paychecks coming, and the rest of football-loving America now has to endure his monotone-rambling, lip-puckering, boring commentary. Lame! But he is still not as lame as his partner…..
8. Jim Nantz
Nantz is the OG of over-enunciating, seemingly spending every waking off-air moment obsessively working on his spoken diction. “Panthers” becomes “Pantherrrrrssssshhhhhhh”. “Bears” become “Bearrrrrrssshhhhh”. And “Panderers” becomes “Panderersssssshhhhhshhhhh”. Never one to shy away from talking down to his audience, he willfully plays stupid when speaking at his listeners, and does it with a self-obsessed oral drone where focusing on your vocal delivery is more important than coming across as authentic. This dude sucks, and he needs to stick to golf.
7. Cris Collinsworth
Like Nantz before him, Collinsworth is one of those guys who plays dumb for the low-hanging fruit of society in order to get paid. His inauthenticity stinks of bullshit, and listening to him overreact to 5-yard rushing plays and 12-yard passes is truly obnoxious. Each and every week we have to hear him announce that “this is the greatest game I’ve ever seen” and “that’s the greatest play I’ve ever witnessed” and other disingenuous takes scripted off of whatever brand he’s promoting that week. He enjoys coming off like an idiot so the average moronic football watcher can relate to him, but he’s a smart guy with a law degree that would more than likely terrify him if you knew about it. He’s full of shit, and he’s one of the exceptions that ex-players make good announcers.
6. Kirk Herbstreit
Where the fuck did this goof come from? Who had ever even heard of this lumpy pile of mediocrity before Amazon unearthed him from the rock he’d been buried under, only to witness him join the corpse of Al Michaels for Amazon’s Thursday Night fuck-a-thon? I’d say watching paint dry is more exciting than listing to Herbstreit, but that would be an insult to colorants everywhere. Apparently, in a move to bore even the most boring of bores, Amazon saw fit to bring in this walking snore fest so he can recite college statistics that absolutely no one ever asked for. Herbstreit also is the unprecedented leader of reflexively agreeing with whatever horseshit call the referee makes, supporting the status quo and never going against the party line. This is already a rampant shilling exercise in the world of sports commentary, but no one is as big a corporate sycophant as Herbstreit nodding in tandem to whatever his superiors ask of him, even at the cost of his own credibility. Completely devoid of personality, and seemingly little experience in speaking with, ya know, words, he is one of the NFL landmarks in pure loin averageness.
5. Spero Dedes
Wild overreactions and rampant over enunciation take on entirely new forms in the shape of Spero Dedes. For Dedes, watching a 29-yard downed punt conjures up the same excitement he holds for seeing the face of Christ on toast. Literally every fucking thing that happens in a football game astounds and mystifies this scruffy chimpanzee. He loves telling you about it too, in extravagant words and forced pronunciations like screeching “MIRACULOUS-AHHHH!!!” when a tight end catches a two-yard TD pass, or squealing “MARVELOUS-AHHHH!!!” when a running back plows through the line for a one-yard score. He’s also fond of referring to frivolous little things like fumbles as “disasters”. One’s mind boggles to consider what he’d think of an earthquake or a wildfire or starving children on the street. Perhaps you should be saving words like “catastrophe” to things that deserve to be called that, and an interception as the offensive inconvenience that it is. Simply everything impresses this dopey sheister as he tries to make you believe he’s really that amazed. He appeals to the low-hanging fruit through disingenuousness, and it’s really fucking gross. Hey Spero, try to speak without gritting your teeth and putting an “ahhhhhhh!!” at the end, because no one wants to hear it.
4. Joe Davis
I straight up can’t listen to this guy. The mute button HAS to go on, otherwise, my blood pressure rises to unsafe levels. Davis plumbs new depths in discovering ways of self-affectation, and erasing all interest in even attempting to come off as genuine. His goal is to lull you into a stupefied trance, where we’re all supposed to accept that grown men only care about their vocal tone, and nothing else. Davis has discovered that talking through duck lips with a curious uptick in tone at the end is the right professional move as an announcer, and so the rest of us have to suffer through what sounds like a retarded duck talking to a 4-year old baby. Seriously, who gives these ignoramuses jobs in public speaking? Mix his tone with a general cluelessness about the sport, and the product is this uber dick, pissing off and annoying even the most patient of fans.
3. Scott Hanson
This guy. THIS guy. Some of you probably don’t have RedZone. Good. You’re better off without it when you consider this frighteningly awful announcer. Remember the waiter in Office Space who is trying to push extreme fajitas with an agonizingly fake smile on his face? That’s basically Scott Hanson in a nutshell. The guy who spends all day and night working on his diction. The man with an empty hole inside him that is only partially filled when he gets to stand there and pretend like a 27-yard field goal is the most amazing thing he’s ever seen. A guy who projects a facade in pretending to care about reporting on Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, and willfully sells any. product that he’s told to sell, all the while doing it with a fake wink and a sleazy grin that only a used car salesman could muster. The dickhead who talks over the game’s announcer while you’re trying to get stats. The douche who thinks he’s changed the world for the better because he shouts in a guttural tone “AHHHCtoBAHHHX” several times a Sunday into the camera. Scott Hanson was genetically modified in a lab somewhere to be a soulless, ball-less nutless monkey who is only too happy to be a whore and a shill in order to make the world a more boring place. This man is absolutely intolerable, and shame on you for liking him.
2. Dan Orlovsky
For those of you who want to see the poster child of all things mediocre, lame, stupid and dangerous, I give you Dan Orlovsky. The guy who ran ten yards out of his own end zone and had no idea and kept throwing passes. The guy who can’t string two fourth-grade level words together. The irretrievable cuntface who prays on a (what’s supposed to be) secular and national television network. Orlovsky is the beacon of mediocrity for millions of dumb people to relate with, and the fact he is still employed by ESPN should make you all very afraid. There are commentators that just suck, then there are shits like Orlovsky, who actually make the world a more ominous place to exist. This man is the face of a very fucked up and inbred future. Luckily he only commentates a few games a year, but it’s enough to remind us all that the new standard is very low indeed.
1.Charles Davis
And the award for worst NFL announcer in the game today goes to this gleaming pile of wet toad shit: Charles Davis. It’s truly remarkable how annoying this man can be in any given week, only to outdo his painful cluelessness each and every subsequent week. It’s like he sets the bar as low as he can, and then asks himself: “how can I go even lower than that?” Davis is the true ninja master of pointing out the obvious and repeating the same stupid cliches week after week, all the while thinking he sounds super smart and cool. One has to marvel at his level of arrogance while somehow offering absolutely nothing to a career that requires almost no skill in the first place. One of his favorite past times is criticizing players for not making plays, all while never being an NFL player himself. I often wonder how badly players want to beat this fuck into submission for criticizing them for not doing something Davis would have absolutely no clue how to even get started with anyway. He’s a humorless troglodyte in a business suit that somehow tripped into professional announcing by simply adhering to the vacuous grind of the Peter Principle, and he’s on a mission to bore the living piss out of each and every member of the viewing audience. Count the number of times he says the word “tackle” in a broadcast — I guarantee you’ll lose count. Most of us strive to be better at our jobs, always looking for new words and methods to employ to not only impress our co-workers and superiors, but to better ourselves as people. Not Davis. He is more than satisfied remaining the static and stagnant fart that he is, lingering in the air and forcing people out of the room with his unwavering dedication to unbridled insipidity. At least some of the worst NFL announcers have a passing concern over their velocity of speech, and make even weak efforts to improve their avenues of communication. Davis reverses this theory, taking a stranglehold over the English language, hijacking it, then forcing it to crash land into the side of a flaming barn house. Perhaps if we were to hand out awards for “best announcers who sound like they’re taking a shit and have never read a book in their lives”, Charles Davis would be the unmatched champion year after year. But in reality, he stands as a shining lighthouse of mediocrity in a sea that’s full of liquid feces.
Occasional Feel Good 