Dave Pasch reflects on difficult decision to leave Cardinals for ESPN’s NFL booth

It took Dave Pasch a single Sunday on the couch to realize he had been running on fumes for most of a quarter century.

Pasch told Jimmy Traina on the Traina Thoughts podcast that leaving the Arizona Cardinals radio booth was painful, even with a national NFL opportunity waiting for him in Bristol. The longtime play-by-play voice signed a multiyear extension with ESPN in June that expanded his portfolio to include the NFL, and taking that assignment meant surrendering the Cardinals job he held for 24 seasons. He now leads one of two NFL Network booths under ESPN’s control, working alongside Kurt Warner and Jason Kelce.

“It was really tough, Jimmy. It was a job that I really enjoyed,” Pasch said. “Obviously, the team did not have great success with the exception of maybe a handful of years. In those 24 years, I had the same partner for 20 years, Ron Wolfley. And then this past year, I worked with A.Q. Shipley, who’s really good, and really enjoyed that. That was the best part of last year because it was really a bad year for the team.”

Wolfley, a former Cardinals fullback, joined the radio broadcast in 2004 after first interviewing for the analyst job when Pasch took over play-by-play, and his raucous, locker-room enthusiasm became the perfect foil for Pasch’s steadier delivery. That partnership concluded when Wolfley stepped down after 20 seasons ahead of the 2025 campaign, though he retained his local midday show and weekly Cardinals program. The franchise then consulted Pasch as it weighed potential successors before settling on A.Q. Shipley that July. The new pairing survived only one season, and Shipley now shares the booth with J.P. Shadrick, whom the Cardinals hired in August to replace Pasch as the team’s radio voice.

“And you know, Michael Bidwill, the owner, had been really good to me over the years,” Pasch added. “And ESPN had been good to me in terms of trying to work around my schedule the best it could with college football.”

For most of his Cardinals tenure, Pasch answered to two employers every weekend. His Saturdays went to ESPN’s college football coverage, most recently alongside analyst Dusty Dvoracek and sideline reporter Taylor McGregor, and the itinerant autumns turned Pasch and Dvoracek into hotel-room movie buddies who unwound with James Bond films and Airplane! between assignments. His Sundays went to Arizona, regardless of how many connecting flights and rental cars stood between the two. The conclusion of football season never brought much respite, either, since the extension he signed in June kept him on ESPN’s NBA and college basketball coverage, where he has called games beside Hubie Brown and Doris Burke.

“So again, I wasn’t looking to leave, but you know, when ESPN offers you the opportunity to do NFL and all the other things were in place, it was great,” he said.

The NFL work has turned Pasch into something of a transatlantic commuter. He made his NFL Network debut with Colts-Commanders at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Oct. 4, with Wes Durham taking his place on ESPN’s Notre Dame-North Carolina broadcast the previous day. The crew stayed in London for Eagles-Jaguars a week later, then moved on to Paris for Saints-Steelers, the league’s first game in the city, on Oct. 25. A Saturday game on Dec. 26 rounds out his four-game NFL Network slate.

“And you know, it’s funny,” Pasch says. “The first week, I’m sitting around on Sunday kind of watching games. I said to my wife, like, ‘Man, I’m tired. Was I always this tired?’ She’s like, ‘Yeah.’ So I guess I just kind of powered through a lot of those Sundays.”

One of those Sundays was grueling enough to provoke a full-throated Chris Russo tirade on First Take last September. Pasch had called Missouri-South Carolina in Columbia on a Saturday night, and when the game ended around 11 p.m., he still faced a 126-mile drive to Kansas City to make a 6 a.m. flight. The cross-country odyssey that followed took him through Denver on a layover of less than an hour and a half, then on to San Jose, where he climbed back into a car and drove to Santa Clara in time for the Cardinals’ 1 p.m. kickoff.

“Some of it was just adrenaline because I enjoyed doing the game so much,” Pasch continues. “I miss being around the team and the organization. But right now, I don’t miss the job because I’m loving what I’m doing.”

College football still claims his Saturdays, and an NBA season is now underway on top of it. But after 24 seasons of wedging Cardinals games into an already congested ESPN schedule, his Sundays largely belong to him again, and nothing he told Traina suggests he’s in any hurry to give them back.