Verne Lundquist would never call it a victory lap, but it’s sort of, kind of, exactly what the 2016 college football season will be for him. After he calls his final game, Army-Navy, on the regular season’s final weekend, it will be just college hoops and golf for Lundquist from here on out.
SEC football, and southern culture, will never be quite the same. Verne Lundquist on calling the game the first game of his final season in College Station, Texas:
“There’s a symmetry to all this. We’re going to open the season in College Station, which is 100 miles due east of where I began my broadcasting career, four days shy of 53 years ago.”
Here it is below, Verne Lundquist saying goodbye and signing off:
Verne signs off from college football one final time. pic.twitter.com/HKWeh84Pp8
— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 10, 2016
Lundquist, 76, grew up in Austin and attended Texas Lutheran University. He later served as sports director at WFAA-TV in Dallas for 16 years and was the long-time radio voice of the Dallas Cowboys.
Lundquist said he started prepping for the 2016 opening weekend soon after he returned home from a late summer vacation to Scandinavia. What an exciting, exhilirating contest he called too as Texas A&M beat UCLA 31-24 in overtime.
“I came back from vacation and had an email from our producer Craig Silver with 308 pages of stories about UCLA and Texas A&M. I think the process of getting ready for a game is such a challenge.
“I think you can’t short-cut it, if you do you’ll get found out.” Indeed Lundquist is old school; he values a strong work ethic above all else, a value that’s unfortunately too often lost among many in sports media today.
As Verne's final SEC season begins, he takes us back 16 years to his first @SECONCBS game #StorytimewithUncleVerne https://t.co/BLyIb2gNh7
— CBS Sports PR (@CBSSportsGang) September 1, 2016
Lundquist will be in Gainesville this Saturday as the Florida Gators take on the Kentucky Wildcats. Then it’s off to Oxford, Mississippi, in week three for a blockbuster- Ole Miss versus Alabama.
CBS will honor him in some manner, but it’s to be announced at this point. In typical Verne Lundquist fashion, he doesn’t want the story to be about himself, but instead the game.
“Verne and I work 15 to 17 games a year and we’ve done it for 10 years now,” partner Gary Danielson said.
“And for those 170 games, we’ve done interviews with five or six players in advance of each game. So let’s call it 1,000 pregame interviews and out of those 1,000 players we’ve met, 995 times Verne ended the session by telling me ‘What a great guy’ and ‘I really enjoyed talking to him’ or ‘What a great story.’
https://twitter.com/PaulMBanks/status/768895117688123393
“Verne always finds the goodness in everybody. He always finds the goodness in the game. He’s never bigger than the game.”
“He really enjoys the preparation for each game. He enjoys visiting with everybody from the student manager to the guy who runs the elevator in the press box to the kids on the team, and he finds the goodness is everybody.”
It’s Lundquist 17th season as the lead voice on CBS’s SEC coverage but he’s been doing prominent sporting events since 1974.
So after a long and storied career, what aspect of college football game day will it be the hardest for Lundquist to say goodbye to?
“It’s the game day experience in the SEC that I will miss the most,” he said.
“I can remember standing at the Alabama-Auburn about three years after I started doing the SEC. It was halftime in a great stadium and the place was awash in color.”
“I put my arm around my wife Nancy and I said ‘Tell me, honestly, would rather be here or would you rather be doing Cincinnati at Tampa Bay?’ And the answer, of course, is that we’d much rather be doing the SEC,” Verne Lundquist concluded.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network. and News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes regularly to the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye publication and Bold Global.
He also consistently appears on numerous radio and television talk shows all across the country. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram and Sound Cloud.