Tom Hart boarded a flight to Memphis this past Thanksgiving.

“Hello laddie!”  

It was Brent Musburger.

The legendary broadcaster’s welcome filled the cabin as he introduced Hart to folks around him, energetic and complimentary as ever. Something’s wrong here, Hart thought. “Brent Musburger should not be introducing me to anyone. I should be pointing out to everybody else that there’s a legend sitting here.”

Two months later, in January, Musburger announced his retirement, and SEC Network would have to fill a void in its prime-time football coverage. Hart was the answer. Alongside analysts Jordan Rodgers and Cole Cubelic, Hart took Musburger’s role in September as the lead play-by-play voice for SEC Saturday Night.

“I’ve never been the type of broadcaster that tries to pattern my delivery or presentation after someone else — you have to be you and you have to be real,” Hart says. “That being said, if I can replicate the energy and the passion that he brought when telling and sharing the stories of participants, then I will be doing that chair and microphone an honor.”

Hart is a 1998 Missouri graduate and Columbia native who has since built a catalog play-calling sporting events for ESPN, Big Ten Network, Fox Sports Radio and CBS College Sports, among others. He’s called more than 1,200 professional baseball games, was a longtime staple over the airways for Atlanta Braves listeners and has been with SEC Network since its launch. When he got the call to take over SEC Saturday Night, he was crossing ‘College World Series Broadcast Team’ off his bucket list.

Now a regular voice for SEC fans and seven weeks into his prime-time slot, Hart is calling his first Mizzou game of the year on Saturday, a 6:30 p.m. matchup against Georgia in Athens.

“Missouri will be the best passing team Georgia has faced this year, and Lock will be the best passing quarterback they’ve seen thus far,” Hart says. “Mizzou’s capacity for the long ball against Kentucky last week — and the offensive line’s ability to give Lock the time to get it off — is the Tigers’ best chance to put points on the board.” Georgia is a legitimate national championship contender, as Hart sees it, and it’ll be a harsh test for Missouri.

No matter the stadium or the team, though, whether he’s calling his alma mater or not, as a broadcaster, the narration — every interaction, formation, adjustment, play call and emotion — is only part of the job. What’s unmistakable for Hart and his on-air partner, former Vanderbilt quarterback (and Bachelorette winner) Jordan Rodgers, is the chemistry. Call it a natural ability to communicate; Hart calls it preparation. Leading up to the season, one of the biggest changes he made to prepare was watching film — not necessarily of SEC teams or games, but of Rodgers, with whom he had never worked.

“Chemistry is so important in the booth, and we have incredible chemistry off the field. We already know that we get along great and share a very similar sense of humor — I certainly don’t have his hair — but you hope that the chemistry in the booth and on air happens immediately,” Hart says.

Now almost two months into the job, the camera-facing chemistry is certainly there. Prime time means a new team for Hart, but if you’ve followed his college football coverage in the past, you won’t notice a change in his mechanics when calling the game or following action on the field. Where you might see a slight difference is in the presentation of the night’s broadcast. “I think what prime time gives you versus other slots is that you have the opportunity to tell the story of an entire day of college football because it’s a shifting landscape,” Hart says. “What you thought was going to be important at 11 a.m. is now drastically different.”

The result has to be added value for the viewer. Hart (and Rodgers and Cubelic) have the ability throughout the night to add a calculated and researched perspective to their narrative. All three were former college football players, although Hart points out his freshman year playing football at Quincy University in Illinois was slightly different than Cubelic’s years at Auburn and Rodgers’ as a Commodore. But the three spend “an inordinate amount of time” studying and watching film as a group, Hart says, and rightfully so.

“SEC fans are incredibly knowledgeable,” he says. “They’re the most knowledgeable fans out there, I would say, of any sport. They can tell you about the fourth string left tackle, and they can tell you about the fifth string linebacker. But what we can bring to the table is the access.”

The narrative of that access —  what an offensive coordinator sees during the game, what a head coach is thinking prior to kickoff, what a quarterback is like off the field —  is powerful. It forms the stories that Hart has found fans want to hear. Audience participation in storytelling is key, and the feeling of integration in the game and its characters is at the heart of it.

“Fans in general want to know perspective,” he says. “And they often look to us for it. ‘Yes we think our quarterback is great, but tell me how he compares to the guy at Georgia or Auburn,’ or ‘What are we doing defensively that’s different than what Alabama does or different than what Florida does?”

Like Musburger who came before him, Hart’s effort behind the microphone starts with a passion for growing along with his career. “There was always a mixture of confidence and question marks,” he says of his journey through broadcasting. “I thought early on that I had the ability to do this, but I didn’t know that I was going to be provided the opportunities to follow through with it. It was very important for me every step of the my career to first critique myself, see where my growth can come and take a second to be real — to handicap, if I could, what step was next and where this could lead me.”

It led to his first gig calling minor league baseball games in South Carolina. And to a roster assignment with a young catcher named Yadier Molina. To the College World Series in Omaha. And to the Memphis Tigers’ locker room celebration after Coach Calipari led them to that Final Four win in ‘08. “I think my favorite part is seeing the growth of some of the people that I’ve covered. To watch the growth of determined individuals and to know where they’ve been makes me very appreciative of the work that they’ve put in.”

After he retired, Musburger said he’d miss the people most, the ones he met along the trail. He and Hart seem to have that in common — an appreciation of the job, but most importantly the relationships formed through a career in storytelling.

The post SEC Network’s Tom Hart on his new role in prime time appeared first on ZOUNation Magazine.

Frank Broyles and the Missouri-Arkansas rivalry

If you’re looking at the stat lines, they’ll show it was 2014 when the Battle Line Rivalry officially began, when Missouri and Arkansas squared off at Faurot Field. Rewind 57 seasons though, and some might argue that the Razorbacks fired the first salvo in 1957, when they hired first-year head coach Frank Broyles away from the Tigers.

The dominos for the Broyles saga were set in motion when Coach Don Faurot retired from Missouri after a 4-5-1 season in ’56. As athletic director, he hired his successor from a list that included future Nebraska coach Bob Devaney.

“I was already 32, and thought the world had passed me by,” Broyles once told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “I had been an assistant coach 10 years and thought maybe I’d never get a chance to be a head coach. I went after the Missouri job as hard as I could.”
Broyles liked his chances. He was a young assistant at Georgia Tech at the time and met with Faurot and the board of curators. “We were staying at the Tiger Hotel, and I said, ‘Barbara, we have to make up our minds whether I want the job, because they are going to offer it to me in the next hour,’“ Broyles said. “About 10 minutes later, the chairman of the board called and said, ‘Let’s have dinner,’ and they offered me the job.”

Broyles signed a one-year contract for $12,000 and told administrators he could work under the so-called “Missouri Plan,” limiting recruiting to in-state players. He had an immediate impact on the process, which included landing the program’s first African American player, running back Norris Stevenson. “I never figured out what exactly led me to Missouri,” Stevenson told me in a 2003 interview. “But I connected with the coaches.”

Broyles’ Tigers started the season strong before fading to 5-4-1. Still, it was the Tigers’ first winning record in five years, and Faurot was impressed enough to offer a $1,000 raise and a one-year contract extension. But that wasn’t before giving Arkansas Athletic Director John Barnhill permission to speak to his first-year coach.

You know the drill: Barnhill presented Broyles with a four-year deal and a $15,000 annual salary, a tremendous number some 50 years ago. The dominoes continued to fall in the Broyles saga, which ended well for both schools, thanks in part to “Devine” intervention. But hiring away another teams’ coach was not common thread back then.

“Frank Broyles was a terrific coach,” Kadlec said to me in an interview for Tales from the Missouri Tigers. “A lot of people held it against him because he left Missouri, but he felt he had an opportunity at Arkansas. At that time, Arkansas was a little more football-oriented than Missouri, for some reason. They were putting more money into it, and he got a tremendous salary down there.”

The decision also caught Missouri administrators off guard, something longtime beat reporter Bob Broeg wrote in his 1974 book Ol’ Mizzou: A Story of Missouri Football.

“At the time, Broyles’ decision to leave came as a shock to Missouri and as a blow to its pride,” Broeg wrote. President Elmer Ellis didn’t believe the news until Faurot and his faculty representative actually brought Broyles to Ellis’ home, Broeg said. “Faurot was embarrassed.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Broyles went on to win a national title in 1964 and coach Arkansas until ’76 when he became the school’s athletic director until his retirement only nine years ago in 2007. As for Mizzou? Coach Dan Devine soon compiled a record of 93-37-7, and the Tigers were the winningest team in the nation for the most of the ’60s.

“Both were outstanding coaches — that goes without saying,” Stevenson says. “Both were disciplinarians, as any coach generally is. But beyond that, the style of play was different. I thought Coach Broyles was much more offensive-minded. Coach Devine came in and saw our limitations as a team offensively and just went to a defensive set. He used what he had.”

If any lingering animosity existed among Faurot, Broyles and Devine, it wasn’t apparent. “Dan was a good friend,” Broyles said. “He used to kid me and say, ‘Frank, you should have stayed. Look what I did with your players.’”

Today, Broyles much more than an interesting footnote to a fledgling rivalry. But to the people who knew him, he helped paved the way for success for the next decade and beyond.

“I know Frank Broyles would have had a tremendous career here at Missouri,” Kadlec says.

Photos: Travis Smith | ContentAllStars.com

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