Credit: Corrigan Sports Enterprises
By Sam Neumann on

Update:  Even though it appeared as if Corrigan believed he was making the call on the replay review, Awful Announcing has learned that an on-field official made the final decision via a monitor. Corrigan was cueing up camera angles for the officiating crew, but the ref retained full control over the available angles, playback speed, and the ability to zoom in on footage.

That has since been confirmed by the NCAA’s Division 1 men’s lacrosse rules subcommittee:

The NCAA Division I Men’s Lacrosse Rules Subcommittee is aware of questions concerning the video review in the game between Penn State and North Carolina Saturday night. The review was undertaken, in accordance with the rules, by the game officials only, with a monitor at the scorer’s table on the field, and the subsequent ruling was made by the game officials only without any outside input.

The original story continues below.

Booker Corrigan spent three minutes Saturday as a replay review official for a crucial crease violation call during the North Carolina-Penn State lacrosse game, asking his production truck to rewind the footage multiple times before ultimately ruling there was no violation. The problem? Corrigan was calling the game as the play-by-play announcer for Corrigan Sports Network, not working as an official.

“We are the review booth also,” Corrigan told viewers during the UNC-Penn State game, which was part of The Crown Lacrosse event in Charlotte. “Folks and listeners, I appreciate you bearing with us because we are the review booth.”

The three-minute review unfolded live as Corrigan repeatedly asked his truck to rewind and pause the footage to examine whether North Carolina’s No. 7 had stepped into the crease. “Can you back it up so that we can see the crease of the Penn State goal?” Corrigan said. “Get ready to pause it, get ready to pause it, get ready to pause it, and I do not see him touch inside the crease. Can you rewind it one more time, please?”

After multiple replays, Corrigan ruled there was nothing in the footage to indicate the Carolina player stepped in the crease. “It was 7, and he’s, you could not see his feet touch inside the crease. Or his hand because his hand went on the ground also,” Corrigan said before the game resumed.

NCAA lacrosse rules specify that “the referee and either the umpire and/or field judge may use the designated video monitor located at the table area to review” specific plays. The rulebook also states that “video review shall be provided by the home team.” An industry source told Awful Announcing that this arrangement — where the play-by-play announcer serves as the video replay official — was potentially agreed upon by the coaches of both teams beforehand.

“And they told us before the game that we were the replay, and I said to myself, please, dear Lord, no replays,” Corrigan continued. “As soon as you, as soon as you said it, you knew at least again it’s gotta be in the, it’s gotta be in the 4th quarter in a one goal game or two goal game or one goal game now, but you knew that that was going to happen as soon as you said.”

Corrigan Sports Network charged viewers $16 to watch the four-game Crown Lacrosse event Saturday, which is more expensive than a full month of ESPN+ at $12 or BTN+ at $13. Games that would typically air on ESPN+, ACCN, or ESPNU are instead appearing behind Corrigan Sports’ paywall, including upcoming matchups between UNC-Harvard and Duke-Cornell in a few weeks.

The Corrigan family is deeply embedded in the lacrosse world. Booker’s cousin, Kevin Corrigan, is the longtime head coach at Notre Dame, where he’s been since 1988 and is the longest-tenured active Division I men’s lacrosse coach in the country. Another cousin, Boo Corrigan, is the athletic director at NC State and served as chair of the College Football Playoff selection committee in 2022 and 2023. Booker’s uncle Gene Corrigan was a two-time All-American lacrosse player at Duke, coached at Virginia, served as athletic director at Notre Dame and Virginia, and was ACC commissioner from 1987 to 1997. Another relative, Tim Corrigan, is the lead NBA producer at ESPN.

Booker Corrigan has worked as a play-by-play announcer for ESPN and CBS Sports, covering college basketball and lacrosse. According to Corrigan Sports Enterprises’ website, he “started at Corrigan Sports Enterprises in 2013 with the goal of growing the lacrosse department” and serves as the play-by-play announcer during Corrigan Sports’ live broadcasts while also crafting voiceovers for the company’s media content.

The family’s lacrosse connections run deep, but so do questions about the quality of Corrigan Sports’ production.

The same industry source told Awful Announcing that Corrigan Sports produced an ESPNU game several years ago — a Syracuse-North Carolina matchup at a high school in Maryland — that was “so awful that ESPN essentially told them they’re never going to produce a college lacrosse game again for them.” The source also questioned how Corrigan Sports continues to secure rights to games featuring major programs like North Carolina, Penn State, Duke, and Cornell, particularly when those games would normally appear on ESPN platforms.

Corrigan defended the pricing and the replay situation on social media following the game, which drew criticism. He said he was told between the third and fourth games of the day that Corrigan Sports would handle replay duties and questioned whether $16 was really excessive, comparing the cost to what he paid for a coffee and breakfast sandwich that morning. Corrigan also suggested that fans who didn’t want to pay could have flown to Charlotte and bought tickets instead.

When pressed on the streaming costs, Corrigan asked where people were getting their other streams for free and noted that, as a retired schoolteacher, he’s always looking to save money himself. He emphasized that he makes no money from the operation and is involved because he loves lacrosse.

Corrigan also addressed the replay situation directly, acknowledging he was sweating through the entire review process and calling it a “crazy scenario” all around. He said he wished it had never happened.

What happened Saturday isn’t happening in a vacuum. Third-party promoters hosting neutral-site events have become increasingly common and increasingly problematic. When games move off campus, they move outside the jurisdiction of the conferences and athletic departments that would normally be responsible for how they’re run. The promoter is in charge. And the promoter’s incentive is to sell the event, not necessarily to make sure everything works once it does.

The Gazelle Group has made itself one of the most prominent neutral-site operators in college basketball, staging more than a dozen games this season alone featuring programs like Duke, Michigan, UCLA, and Tennessee. But earlier this year, a dispute over photo credentialing turned into a full boycott — AP, Getty, and Imagn — all refused to send photographers to Gazelle events after the company required them to surrender licensing rights to their images as a condition of access. Duke beat Michigan in what became ESPN’s best-rated regular-season college basketball game in seven years, and it went almost entirely undocumented by professional wire photographers. The Gazelle Group’s response was that wire services needed to “catch up to the times.”

In 2022, a women’s basketball invitational at The Mirage in Las Vegas was held in a hotel ballroom with chairs instead of stands, and when Auburn’s Kharyssa Richardson was injured, paramedics took more than 40 minutes to arrive. Indiana coach Teri Moren called it “a major miss.” It was that, and then some.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The National Duals Invitational, a college wrestling event held last fall in Tulsa with a title sponsor, a legitimate arena, a $1 million prize pool, and the championship match on ESPN2, showed what a well-run third-party event actually looks like. But that’s the exception, not the rule. For every event that gets it right, there are too many run by promoters who oversell their capabilities and underdeliver on the basics, and because the games are off campus and the conferences aren’t running the show, there’s no standard floor.

Lacrosse isn’t immune to any of this, and Saturday made that clear. Recently, ESPN’s Anish Shroff addressed concerns about problems in college lacrosse broadcasting during an appearance on The Ride: Lacrosse Podcast, though he didn’t mention Corrigan Sports or any specific company by name.

“Sometimes you could be in a corporate culture where, you know, there’s kind of this fear of trying new things,” Shroff said. “And I think you always need that start-up mentality. Hey, try it. Let’s see if it works. Let’s push it. I think I give the PLL a lot of credit in that regard. They’re not afraid to try new things, to try to push the sport forward, and they take some criticism for it. But I think that’s the space that lacrosse is in. You have to be innovative. You have to take chances because otherwise you’re not moving the needle.”

Trying new things may be part of growing the sport. But asking viewers to pay $16 for a broadcast where the announcer is also running a replay probably isn’t the blueprint.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann