You know the season is just around the corner when the announcing teams for Week 1 of the 2019 regular season are announced. On Tuesday, CBS announced the broadcast teams for their Week 1 slate of games. A few weeks prior, FOX did the same.
The Detroit Lions open up their regular season on the road with the Arizona Cardinals. Here’s their crew:
Play-by-play: Dick Stockton
Color commentator: Mark Schlereth
Sideline reporter: Jennifer Hale
Though FOX doesn’t offer any official rankings of their broadcasting crews, this is the last grouping listed in FOX’s press release. Additionally, voters at Awful Announcing chose the Stockton-Schlereth duo as the third-worst pairing in 2018—the worst at FOX.
It should come as no surprise that the Lions drew Stockton-Schlereth-Hale, as Cardinals-Lions is one of three Week 1 matchups featuring two teams that finished in the bottom 10 last year (Bills-Jets pulled in CBS’s ‘bottom’ crew; 49ers-Buccaneers got Kenny Albert and Ronde Barber).