According to a report from Bobby Burack and Ryan Glasspiegel of The Big Lead, ESPN is toying with the ideas to change up some of its college football play-by-play teams in the wake of Brock Huard’s departure for Fox. Their report focuses on the network’s plans for two former quarterbacks: Dan Orlovsky and Matt Hasselbeck.
The report notes that executives at ESPN have clearly become fond of Orlovsky in his time with the network. He arrived less than a year ago and has already become a fixture in college football play-by-play booths, studio shows for both college football and the NFL, and on Get Up!. “You see him on their airwaves day and night enough to wonder if there is more than one of him,” Burack and Glasspiegel write.
Orlovsky, according to The Big Lead’s reporting is being discussed as a replacement for Huard. Whether that means he would become Bob Wischusen’s new partner or that Orlovsky would simply be a part of whatever new team is slid into that spot in ESPN’s assignment rotation is unclear.
Matt Hasselbeck has some experience as a game analyst, having worked the 2018 Pro Bowl. If he moves into that role full time for college football, it could mean more shakeups for ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown, but Burack and Glasspiegel seem to think it could be the right move. “Hasselbeck could very well be more suited for the booth than the studio. There, his ability to break down the action of what just happened — as opposed to bombastic soundbites forecasting what could happen — would be on display.”
How close these rumors are to being true, and what effects that could have on current ESPN programming is unknown. An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment for The Big Lead’s story.
