Screen grab: ‘The Dale Jr. Download’
By Sam Neumann on

Rick Allen is calling sports again, just not the sport most people expected.

The former NBC NASCAR play-by-play voice will be the new broadcaster for the Professional Bowlers Association on The CW starting in 2026.

Allen’s hiring comes after NBC declined to renew his contract following the 2024 season, ending his 20-plus-year run calling NASCAR races. Leigh Diffey replaced him in the Cup Series booth while Allen finished out his NBC contract calling Xfinity Series races before that series moved to The CW.

The PBA gig reunites Allen with The CW, which now airs NASCAR’s Xfinity Series along with ACC and Pac-12 football and basketball, WWE NXT, and various other properties. The network announced in April that it secured rights to 10 PBA telecasts starting in 2026 as part of a two-year deal. Fox had been the PBA’s primary broadcast partner since 2018, averaging 738,000 viewers for last year’s PBA World Championship.

Professional bowling is about as far from stock car racing as you can get, but it’s still live sports on broadcast television. The CW has turned itself into a sports network through sheer volume of lower-tier rights deals, and live sports now accounts for roughly 40% of the network’s programming. Allen calling PBA events on the same network that airs NASCAR’s Xfinity Series creates an interesting situation where he’s technically still connected to the motorsports world, just not in the way he or NASCAR fans probably hoped.

Whether this leads back to a NASCAR booth remains unclear. Allen has made it obvious he’d return to calling races if given the opportunity. The CW relationship keeps him in the orbit, and stranger things have happened than a broadcaster working his way back into a sport after getting squeezed out.

For now, though, Allen’s voice will be soundtracking strikes and spares instead of late-race restarts.

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