There are certain sounds that instantly take you somewhere.
The crack of a baseball hitting a wooden bat.
The squeak of sneakers on a basketball court.
The opening notes of a television theme you haven’t heard in 30 years.
And for generations of college football fans, there was Keith Jackson.
You didn’t need to see the ABC logo in the corner of the television.
You didn’t need someone to tell you it was a big game.
If Keith Jackson was behind the microphone, you knew.
Something important was about to happen.
And sooner or later, there was a pretty good chance you’d hear:
“Whoa, Nellie!”
Today, Jackson is remembered so fondly that it’s easy to turn his career into one long victory lap.
It wasn’t.
He wasn’t always universally loved. His style wasn’t necessarily perfect for every sport or every broadcast. And at one point, ABC essentially told him that somebody else was better suited for what was becoming the biggest sports show on television.
Ironically, that rejection may have helped put Keith Jackson exactly where he belonged.
He Wasn’t Supposed to Become “The College Football Guy”
Jackson’s path to broadcasting royalty wasn’t obvious.
Born in Georgia in 1928, he grew up on a farm, served in the Marines and attended Washington State University.
He began calling Washington State football in 1952 and joined ABC in 1964.
But Jackson wasn’t hired to do one thing.
He did practically everything.
Baseball.
Basketball.
Boxing.
Auto racing.
The Olympics.
Professional football.
He even worked news assignments.
Keith Jackson wasn’t being groomed from birth to become the voice of college football.
He was a broadcaster.
A very good one.
And in 1970, ABC handed him a job that looked like it might define his career.
Keith Jackson Was the Original Voice of Monday Night Football
This part sometimes gets lost.
When Monday Night Football debuted on September 21, 1970, with the Cleveland Browns playing the New York Jets, the famous booth wasn’t Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell and Don Meredith.
It was:
Keith Jackson. Howard Cosell. Don Meredith.
Jackson was the play-by-play announcer for the first season of Monday Night Football.
That’s not a footnote.
ABC was attempting something enormous.
Putting a weekly NFL game in prime time was a major television experiment, and producer Roone Arledge wanted to turn football into something closer to entertainment.
More cameras.
More graphics.
More personalities.
More spectacle.
And Jackson was sitting right in the middle of it.
Then ABC fired him from the show.
And He Didn’t Exactly Get a Nice Goodbye
The problem wasn’t necessarily that Jackson had suddenly forgotten how to broadcast football.
ABC had originally wanted former New York Giants star Frank Gifford for Monday Night Football, but Gifford was still under contract with CBS.
Jackson got the job.
When Gifford became available in 1971, ABC made the change.
Out went Jackson.
In came Gifford.
And according to accounts of the episode, Jackson didn’t even initially learn about the decision from Arledge.
He was traveling when he received a stack of messages from reporters wanting his reaction to the news that he was being replaced.
Imagine finding out you’ve lost one of the most prestigious jobs in your profession because reporters keep calling to ask how you feel about losing it.
Jackson was understandably unhappy with ABC.
And if history had gone a little differently, getting bounced from Monday Night Football might have become the defining disappointment of his career.
Instead, something strange happened.
Keith Jackson went back to college football.
And television history worked out just fine.
Maybe Monday Night Football Wasn’t Really His Show Anyway
Looking back, it’s hard not to wonder whether ABC accidentally did Jackson a favor.
Monday Night Football became a television phenomenon.
But it became a very particular kind of television phenomenon.
Cosell was bombastic.
Meredith was funny and unpredictable.
Gifford became the steady presence holding everything together.
The booth itself was part of the entertainment.
Keith Jackson’s greatest strength was almost the opposite.
He didn’t need to be the show.
College football already had a show.
There were 100,000 people in the stadium.
There was a marching band.
There were cheerleaders.
There were fight songs.
There were rivalries that had been going on for 70 years.
Jackson’s job wasn’t to compete with all of that.
It was to make sure you noticed it.
And that’s where he became great.
He Sounded Like College Football
Maybe it was the cadence.
Maybe it was the language.
Maybe it was the slight Southern drawl.
Maybe it was simply repetition. After enough Saturdays, our brains connected that voice with the sport.
Whatever happened, Keith Jackson eventually stopped sounding like an announcer who happened to call college football.
He sounded like college football itself.
The camera would sweep across a packed stadium.
The band would be playing.
Then Jackson’s voice would come through the television.
You knew where you were.
Saturday afternoon.
Big game.
Let’s go.
“Whoa, Nellie!” Was Only Part of It
Of course, there were the phrases.
“Whoa, Nellie!”
Offensive linemen became the “big uglies.”
Michigan Stadium became “The Big House,” a nickname Jackson helped popularize nationally.
The Rose Bowl was “The Granddaddy of Them All.”
Some of it could be corny.
That’s worth admitting.
Put a few Keith Jackson expressions into the mouth of a modern broadcaster and social media would probably have a field day with them.
But Jackson could get away with it because it didn’t sound manufactured.
He wasn’t sitting in a production meeting trying to create something that might become his personal brand.
That’s just how Keith Jackson talked.
And after a while, college football fans started talking that way too.
He Wasn’t Perfect — And That’s Part of Why He Worked
There’s a tendency to remember legendary broadcasters only through their greatest calls.
Jackson had rough broadcasts.
He occasionally misidentified players.
He could wander.
Late in his career, there were moments when he wasn’t as sharp as he had been decades earlier.
And his old-fashioned style would probably be a difficult fit inside today’s hyper-produced broadcasts.
That’s okay.
Keith Jackson’s appeal wasn’t technical perfection.
It was authenticity.
He sounded like a human being watching a football game rather than a person auditioning for his next viral clip.
And perhaps his greatest broadcasting skill was something that sounds absurdly simple.
He knew when to stop talking.
He Let the Game Breathe
Listen to older college football broadcasts and one difference jumps out.
There’s space.
Not every second needs commentary.
Not every play requires a statistic.
Not every storyline needs to be explained seven times.
Jackson understood that the crowd was part of the broadcast.
So was the band.
So was the stadium.
So was the silence immediately before a huge snap.
Sometimes the best thing an announcer can do after an incredible play is say something memorable…
and then get out of the way.
Modern sports television doesn’t always trust silence.
Jackson did.
He Understood College Football Wasn’t Just Football
This may have been his greatest advantage.
Keith Jackson understood something that television executives have occasionally forgotten:
College football isn’t popular simply because people enjoy watching football.
If that were true, we’d just watch the NFL.
College football is Saturday mornings.
Tailgates.
Marching bands.
Fight songs.
Students painted from head to toe.
Alumni coming back every fall.
Arguments about games played before anyone involved was born.
Stadiums that have been standing for a century.
Rivalries that make otherwise rational adults completely irrational for one weekend every year.
Jackson treated those things as part of the game.
He didn’t just tell you who carried the football.
He told you where you were.
A game in Ann Arbor wasn’t supposed to feel like a game in Tuscaloosa.
Columbus wasn’t Austin.
And nothing was quite like Pasadena on New Year’s Day.
The Rose Bowl Became His Stage
If Keith Jackson belonged to college football, he seemed especially at home at the Rose Bowl.
He called the game 15 times.
The mountains.
The late-afternoon California sun.
The parade.
The history.
The absurdly beautiful stadium.
The whole thing looked like college football had hired Hollywood to design a set.
Jackson loved the pageantry of the sport, and the Rose Bowl was essentially pageantry with a football game attached.
So perhaps it was appropriate that it became the setting for his final broadcast.
And he didn’t exactly go out calling a 24-10 game nobody remembers.
He got Texas-USC.
The Perfect Last Game
January 4, 2006.
USC entered the Rose Bowl riding a 34-game winning streak.
Texas was undefeated.
Pete Carroll against Mack Brown.
Matt Leinart.
Reggie Bush.
Vince Young.
A national championship on the line.
And somehow the game exceeded the hype.
With 26 seconds remaining, Texas faced fourth-and-5 from the USC 8-yard line, trailing 38-33.
Everyone knew Vince Young was the man who could beat USC.
USC still couldn’t stop him.
Young took the snap, rolled right and ran into the end zone.
Texas won 41-38.
One of the greatest college football games ever played.
And then Keith Jackson walked away.
That was his final broadcast.
There’s something almost suspiciously perfect about it.
The man most associated with college football finished his career at the Rose Bowl, calling an undefeated Texas team ending USC’s dynasty in a game people are still talking about decades later.
You couldn’t have scheduled a better ending.
Getting Fired Worked Out Pretty Well
That’s what makes Jackson’s career more interesting than simply calling him a legend.
He didn’t follow some perfectly constructed path toward college football immortality.
He got one of the biggest jobs in television.
Then he lost it.
Frank Gifford replaced him and became synonymous with Monday Night Football for decades.
Jackson could have become the guy who got pushed out before the show became a cultural institution.
Instead, he returned to the place where his personality, voice and broadcasting philosophy fit better.
College football.
Sometimes the job you lose isn’t the job that defines you.
The Voice We Still Hear
Keith Jackson died in 2018 at 89.
By then, college football had already changed dramatically.
It’s changed even more since.
Conferences stretch from coast to coast.
Players transfer.
The playoff has expanded.
Television windows dictate when games are played.
Games appear across networks and streaming services from noon until sometime after most reasonable people should be asleep.
There are excellent broadcasters working today.
There are better cameras.
Better graphics.
More statistics.
More access.
More football than fans of Jackson’s era could possibly have imagined.
But something is harder to manufacture.
A voice becoming attached to a sport.
For millions of people, hearing Keith Jackson today doesn’t just bring back an old football game.
It brings back a Saturday.
Maybe you’re watching with your dad.
Maybe you’re lying on the living-room floor.
Maybe Ohio State and Michigan are playing.
Maybe you’re watching the Rose Bowl while the sun disappears behind the San Gabriel Mountains.
The picture isn’t HD.
There isn’t a score bug showing you 14 different pieces of information.
Nobody is discussing the transfer portal.
And somewhere in the background, Keith Jackson is talking about the big uglies.
ABC once decided Keith Jackson wasn’t the man it wanted calling its biggest football show.
ABC was probably right.
Frank Gifford was a better fit for what Monday Night Football became.
And Keith Jackson?
He found the job that fit him so perfectly that generations later, people still hear his voice whenever they think about college football.
Sometimes getting fired works out that way.
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