Ian Eagle in for Verne Lundquist in NCAA Tournament regional final
Ian Eagle with Sarah Kuston before a Nets game at Barclays Center on Feb. 26, 2018. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Ian Eagle will call his first NCAA Tournament regional final on television later this month, CBS and Turner announced Monday, filling a spot long occupied by Verne Lundquist.
Lundquist, 77, previously retired from college football play-by-play after the 2016 season. He is expected to continue on CBS’ coverage of the Masters in April.
Eagle, 49, will be paired with Jim Spanarkel, his longtime analyst on Nets games and college basketball, along with sideline reporter Allie LaForce.
Eagle’s already high national profile got a boost last month when he called a Syracuse-Miami game for CBS that his son, Noah, a Syracuse junior, called for Syracuse’s radio station. Before the game, Noah interviewed Ian, a Syracuse alumnus, and the video became a social media sensation. CBS also carried two minutes of Noah’s play-by-play during the telecast.
“That’s our dynamic, so we don’t think twice about sarcastic back-and-forths and mirroring in our speech pattern,” Ian told Newsday last week. “I think when others see it, you see it through their eyes, which was ‘oh, I guess it is pretty cool.’
“But the interview didn’t take place with the idea it would be seen by over a million people. It was a pregame, three-minute chat. People were taken by it. It was surprising in a good way.”
Ian said the two minutes of Noah’s play-by-play that CBS carried seemed about right.
“Whenever you do something like that, you walk that very fine line of that was just enough and not too much where the viewer is like, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t sign up for this,’ ” he said.
The entire experience, Ian said, “was beyond surreal, truly. I can understand [why it was so popular] based on our similar mannerisms and the fact that now there are rumors of cloning.”
With Eagle working the NCAA Tournament and Syracuse on the bubble for a berth, might the two reprise their parallel calls in March?
Probably not. In Syracuse’s intensely competitive sports broadcasting environment, that assignment would go to a senior.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
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