Eric Collins has been waiting for this moment since 2002.
The Charlotte Hornets play-by-play voice made his NFL debut on Fox’s Dolphins-Panthers broadcast earlier this month, delivering the kind of electric performance that made casual viewers wonder where he’d been hiding all these years. He hasn’t been hiding at all. He’s been grinding, and that grind finally paid off in a big way.
“I had a blast. Total bucket list thing,” Collins told host Brandon Contes on the Awful Announcing Podcast. “I’ve been grinding away for a long time. I’ve been playing a lot of left field and batting seventh in a lot of people’s lineups for years and years and years.”
Collins has called college football and college basketball for Fox, handled NBA duties for the Hornets and soon for Prime Video, and worked on MLB broadcasts. He’s been everywhere, but rarely as the headliner.
His connection to the NFL actually goes back further than most people realize. Fox Sports used to run NFL Europe as a developmental league for broadcasting talent, sending young producers, directors, analysts, and play-by-play announcers overseas to get their reps in.
“Actually, the odd thing about it was, Fox Sports had this fantastic thing years ago — NFL Europe, which kind of went hand in hand with Fox Sports. And there’s a lot of really young talent: producers, directors, analysts, play-by-plays, that went over to Europe and spent time. This is back in 2002, and I had a season over there for NFL Europe, which many considered to be the pipeline to the NFL,” Collins said. “It just happened to take me 23 years to make it through that pipeline. But it was well worth it. I had a blast.”
Twenty-three years. That’s how long it took for Collins to get from that first NFL-adjacent assignment to an actual NFL broadcast on American soil. In the meantime, he built a career that spans multiple sports and networks, quietly becoming one of the most versatile announcers in the business.
“I do college football for Fox Sports, and I have consistently for years,” Collins explained. “And my crew had that specific week off. And I was told, ‘Hey, are you available to do an NFL game if we have one?’ And there’s a lot of moving parts. So, I knew that there was a chance I was going to be on the schedule. I didn’t know what game or where it was going to be. Just lucky circumstances. I happen to live here in Charlotte, not necessarily a Panther fan, but the game happened to be here local, so that was kind of fun.”
Collins has lived in Charlotte for a decade but had never attended a Panthers game before calling one on national TV. He’s a Cleveland native and Browns fan through and through, and he told Panthers fans before the broadcast that he’d be calling it down the middle.
He should’ve told Dolphins fans that, too, though his broadcast partner, Mark Schlereth, was more than happy to handle that himself.
“Mark was fantastic. I still call him nothing but ‘Mark.’ I know the world calls him ‘Stink,’ but I never felt close enough to him,” Collins said. “He was great, man. The great thing about the NFL and Fox Sports is they do it right. So, he was on-site Thursday for a game that didn’t air until Sunday. And so, he and I went to practices together. We had an untold amount of meetings together. We had dinners together. We got the chance to pick each other’s brains. I think he understood who I was. I got to know him a little bit better. He was a pro’s pro.
“That’s kind of the cool thing about my career experience is I’ve been doing this a long time, and like I said, I’ve never really kind of been a star. I’ve just been a plugger, kind of a ham-and-egger type of guy. And I’ve worked with hundreds of different analysts in my career in all the different sports I’ve worked. So, kind of getting to know people is the thing that comes with the territory.”
And so is getting to know the audience, too.
For his call of Dolphins-Panthers, Collins brought his signature enthusiasm with him to Bank of America Stadium, making Rico Dowdle’s 206-yard performance and Bryce Young’s game-winning touchdown feel bigger than a Week 5 game between two struggling teams had any right to feel.
Over two decades after calling NFL Europe games, Collins finally got his NFL debut stateside. The pipeline took a while, but he made it through.
Listen to the full episode of the Awful Announcing Podcast featuring Eric Collins beginning Thursday, Oct. 16. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. For more content, subscribe to AA’s YouTube page.