ESPN has announced that Joe Tessitore and Booger McFarland won’t return to Monday Night Football. ESPN has not yet named their replacements.
Michael McCarthy of FrontOfficeSports.com reports that ESPN is biding its time because it plans to shift Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit into the NFL booth if the college football season is canceled or postponed.
This suggests that ESPN knows something that the rest of us don’t. By all indications, college football plans to proceed as scheduled, at a minimum with the biggest schools in the biggest conferences getting their games in. But with eight Alabama players testing positive in recent weeks and Houston shutting down voluntary workouts after six players tested positive, there’s a chance that the effort to play college football will collapse like a proverbial house of cards.
On one hand, there’s too much money riding on it. On the other hand, the sheer number of players and programs will make it hard to safely and effectively play games from September through December.
So even though the impression has been created that both college and NFL football will happen in 2020, there’s still a chance it will only be the NFL. If so, Fowler and Herbstreit will still be working.