This broken by Awful Announcing, the first-year NFL on Fox announcing team of Kevin Burkhardt, John Lynch and Erin Andrews will be calling one Divisional Playoff game next month. This marks the second consecutive season Fox Sports will have assigned a team other than Kenny Albert, Daryl Johnston and Tony Siragusa to the playoffs.
Last season, Fox went with Thom Brennaman, Brian Billick and Laura Okmin, but Billick was widely criticized for his performance.
For Burkhardt, it’s a meteoric rise ever since he was named to the NFL on Fox roster this past summer. Before joining Fox, he was mostly known in New York and in baseball circles as the sideline reporter for SNY on New York Mets games. Others may have known him for his radio calls on Dallas Cowboys games for Compass Media Networks.
But for Burkhardt, to get a playoff assignment in his first year on network television shows is very impressive. He has had a very good debut year and has jelled quite well with Lynch throughout the season.
NFL playoff assignments on TV are very hard to come by. CBS, Fox and NBC usually assign them to their top two teams (well in NBC’s case, their only two teams), but Fox has taken a different approach, similar to what NBC used to do when it had the AFC in the 1980’s and into the 1990’s by giving what it felt was the most deserving team to call a Wild Card playoff game before going into the Divisional Round.
We’ll find out to which game Burkhardt, Lynch and Andrews will be assigned as we get closer to the playoffs.
