Jason Benetti, Dave Flemming added to NBC college football lineup

Jason Benetti and Dave Flemming are joining NBC’s college football broadcast lineup this season, Awful Announcing has learned, with each set to call select Big Ten games as part of the network’s play-by-play rotation in 2026.

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They’re not joining that flagship Saturday-night crew, which otherwise looks exactly like it did a year ago. Noah Eagle, Todd Blackledge, and Kathryn Tappen return to call Big Ten Saturday for a fourth consecutive season together, with Blackledge entering his 33rd season calling college football overall. The trio will handle the USC-San Jose State opener before beginning its Saturday-night slate proper with No. 16 Michigan hosting Western Michigan on Sept. 5, the coaching debut of new Wolverines head man Kyle Whittingham.

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Dan Hicks and Jason Garrett are also back in NBC’s Notre Dame Football booth, now in the network’s 36th season of Fighting Irish coverage, with Hicks returning for a third straight year in South Bend and Garrett for a fifth. They’ll open the season calling No. 4 Notre Dame against Wisconsin in primetime at Lambeau Field on Sept. 6, ahead of a schedule that includes No. 7 Miami visiting South Bend on Nov. 7 and No. 19 SMU on Nov. 21. The one change to that Notre Dame crew is on the sideline, where Caroline Pineda steps into the full-time reporter role after handling the network’s Blue-Gold Game and Pro Day broadcasts; she’ll also pick up select Big Ten sideline assignments alongside her Notre Dame duties.

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In addition to Benetti and Flemming,  Paul Burmeister returns as the network’s other lead play-by-play voice. Elsewhere, Yogi Roth is back as a full-season analyst and will also work as a College Countdown field reporter on select game days, Matt Cassel joins as an analyst for select Big Ten games, and Ashley ShahAhmadi makes her NBC college football debut as a sideline reporter.

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Flemming’s addition answers a question that’s been hanging since June, when Awful Announcing first reported that his June 23 call of a Braves-Padres game was actually the end of his 16-year run at ESPN, not just his MLB assignments there. He’d joined ESPN in 2010 as a college basketball voice and built out a wide-ranging portfolio from there, calling Saturday college football on ABC and ESPN alongside Brock Osweiler, working golf majors, and handling MLB across the network’s platforms, all while also part of the San Francisco Giants’ radio booth, subbing on Warriors radio broadcasts, and calling Stanford football for six seasons. NBC had already added him as a second Sunday Leadoff voice in May alongside Matt Vasgersian, and he’d since called several of those broadcasts, but it was unclear — until now — whether he’d continue lending his voice to college football at NBC.

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Benetti’s addition closes out a similar loose thread. NBC hired him in March to anchor the return of Sunday Night Baseball for the first time since 2000, and it was understood from the start that his job would eventually expand past baseball. As recently as June, though, Benetti told the Sports Media Watch Podcastthat the conversation about football or basketball hadn’t even happened yet, with the baseball launch taking up all of his attention. That began to change earlier this month, when NBC added him to its NBA rotation for a mix of regular-season and playoff games without bumping any of Eagle, Mike Tirico, Terry Gannon, or Michael Grady. College football, the sport where Benetti spent his Fox tenure calling Big Ten and Big 12 games alongside Robert Griffin III, was the last unresolved piece of his old job.

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College Countdown is otherwise unchanged at the top, with Ahmed Fareed back as host alongside analysts Chris Simms, Joshua Perry, college football insider Nicole Auerbach, and NFL Draft analyst Connor Rogers, the latter of whom took over as Simms’s midweek Unbuttoned co-host last September, stepping into the role Fareed vacated as his own NBC workload expanded. John Fanta will host the first four weeks of the season in Fareed’s place while Fareed is tied up with MLB coverage, on top of his usual game-break hits and “Fanta in 60” segments. It’s one more addition to a year that’s already included Fanta becoming NBC’s lead Big East voice last August, his NBA on NBC play-by-play debut in February, his Sunday Leadoff debut in May, an infield reporting stint at the Kentucky Derby in April, and hosting NBC and Overtime’s OT7 high school football coverage in June.

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Whether Flemming and Benetti’s college football workload grows beyond this season, and whether either eventually calls games outside the Big Ten, remains to be seen. For now, NBC has two new voices in the fold and a schedule that kicks off in 10 days.

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