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February 9, 2025
With Alabama’s All-American wide receiver Ryan Williams finally turning 18 on Sunday, college football commentators the nation over are struggling to develop some new live telecast talking points ahead of covering Crimson Tide football games throughout the 2025 season. CFB News Now had a chance to catch up with several of them this weekend to hear some ideas they had for how they might fill the sizable void left in the wake of Williams’ graduation into adulthood.
“Early on, we can talk about how much noise Bama would have made in the 2024 CFP, and then later, after the Crimson Tide have suffered a few surprising losses, we can discuss whether they should be included in the 2025 12-team playoff. It’s that in-betweeny time that I’m worried about,” said Joe Tessitore via Apple FaceTime.
Kirk Herbstreit even had a chance to weigh in, adding, “How much is Bama paying for their roster in 2025? We got quite a bit of mileage out of that for Ohio State last year, so maybe we can explore that a bit?”
“What if we just didn’t talk so much?” said Greg McElroy via iOS message early Sunday morning.
Regardless of which announcing approach is taken this fall, the task of filling the air left by the absence of comments like, “Reminder, folks: Ryan Williams is only 17,” is a challenging one. A CFB News Now analysis of Alabama telecasts found that a full 41% of comments made during Bama games last season in some way pertained to Ryan Williams’ age. The repetition was so consistent that, by season’s end, about as many people could name the current United States president as could tell you that Ryan Williams was 17, one YouGov poll showed.
