Sean McDonough has spent this season back in his happy place.
The longtime play-by-play man returned to college football after two seasons in the “Monday Night Football” booth and will be calling a College Football Playoff game for the first time a week from Saturday when Notre Dame takes on Clemson.
“I knew what I was going to miss when I stepped away, just this sort of atmosphere around all these games,” McDonough said. “We are fortunate with our group we get to do one of the best college games in the country each week. … More than anything it’s the anticipation of the games, the atmosphere around them.”
But McDonough wanted to know there would be a playoff game involved when ESPN negotiated his return to college after his “MNF” analyst Jon Gruden left to coach the Raiders again and the NFL booth went through a shake-up.
“ ‘Monday Night Football’ is a tremendous opportunity,” McDonough, 56, said. “And when you go back, I wanted to know I was going to back to the best possible situation. Having a chance to do one of these semifinal games was a big part of it.
“And they were nice enough to allow us every week to have a dialogue of what game we were going to do week-to-week. I knew going back we were going to be in a great situation every week.”
With Gruden gone, both sides felt it was time to give a new look to the booth with Joe Tessitore moving into the play-by-play role, alongside analysts Jason Witten and Booger McFarland. McDonough seems genuinely pleased with his new role and few would question that he is one of the top college football voices in the country.
“I was joking with somebody the other day that I went from being good, to not good, to being good again,” McDonough said of fan criticism as he went from college to NFL then back to college.
“If anything bothered me it was the idea that some had that it was too big for me. I did the World Series on national TV when I was 30 years old. I did the Olympics, every major golf championship, every BCS bowl game. ‘Monday Night Football’ is big, but is it bigger than any number of things that I’ve done? I guess that’s the part that bugged me.”
McDonough, analyst Todd Blackledge and sideline reporter Holly Rowe will be calling the playoff game, the Sugar Bowl between Texas and Georgia then the national title game on the radio in the span of a week. McDonough said he believes the setup of college football games lends itself to his strengths as a broadcaster.
“College football is much more about storytelling,” McDonough said. “When you do the games every week a lot of the people watching don’t know much or anything about the players on the field. When you do an NFL game, you know a lot about those people you are watching. It’s not as important that the announcers humanize the participants. People aren’t tuning into an NFL game to hear Tom Brady has a stamp collection. I enjoy doing that.”