The 2024 NFL season has seen a lot of change on the broadcasting front. Between shakeups on the Fox and CBS teams, Netflix broadcasting two Christmas Day games, Peacock broadcasting an exclusive game from Brazil, new major alternate broadcasts from Disney/ESPN+ (Simpsons Funday Football) and Peacock (EA Sports NFL Maddencast), and more, there were a lot of shifts in the booths this season. And we want your opinion on how the various broadcaster booths have done.
As with all of our rankings (NFL/CFB rules analysts, then announcers for CFB, MLB, NBA, CBB, WNBA, NHL, and more), the bottom of this post will contain a form to vote (also available here). The form will feature a list of announcing teams, presented alphabetically by network, and then by the play-by-play announcer’s last name. It will ask you to grade those teams individually from A to F. A is the best grade and F is the worst.
You can grade as few or as many teams as you desire. Once you’ve selected your grades, submit them. Feel free to add comments or explanations for your grades as well, but it’s not required. All votes and comments are anonymous, and email addresses are not collected.
A few notes on who’s included here. We’re expanding this from our 2023 rankings given the prominence of the single-game Netflix and Peacock broadcasts. That also means that some announcers (such as Noah and Ian Eagle) show up twice with different booths. In those (and all) cases, we’re asking you to grade the overall booth, so it can be valid to give the same announcer different grades for their work in different booths.
With that expansion, it also made sense to throw in the two different NFL Network booths Chris Rose worked this year, and the high-profile Simpsons and Madden altcasts with their own broadcast teams. (However, Kevin Harlan’s single game on NFL Network with Trent Green is included with his CBS work with Green.) And, seeing as we’re including those altcasts, ESPN’s ManningCast is included here for the first time as well despite it being much further from a standard broadcast than anything else (with no real play-by-play).
All of the altcasts have their own unique elements, and there are small sample sizes for them. But that’s also true for those Netflix, Peacock, and single-game NFL Network booths. Even the booths that work together week to week have some differences, with there being significant changes between regional CBS and Fox action and primetime games. So it seems worth it to get our readers’ thoughts on as wide a variety of booths as possible: even if the work they’re doing is different, it’s still game commentary. And it will be interesting to see how these different booths stack up in our readers’ estimation.
However, we did hold the line on expansion in some areas. Paramount Global’s Nickelodeon altcast isn’t here because this season doesn’t happen until the Wild Card round of the playoffs, and Prime Video’s PrimeVision with Next Gen Stats isn’t included because it uses the same commentary feed as their main broadcast. But those will be included if we do a later ranking of altcasts.
All in all, this gives us a nice group of 25 booths to rank, equivalent to what we did for college football this year. Feel free to vote for as few or as many as desired, and you can Control-F to find a team you’re particularly interested in voting for. The form is below, and also here, and will be open through 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT on Wednesday, Jan. 1. The rankings will be announced at Awful Announcing on Thursday, Jan. 2.
Thanks for voting!