Chris Fowler is returning to ESPN's Monday Night Football booth, the network announced Wednesday.
Fowler originally joined the network in 1986, assumed hosting duties of College GameDay in 1990, and in 2014 became ESPN's lead college football play-by-play voice.
Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit took on additional MNF duties in 2020-21 as the network's No. 2 team. Herbstreit switched to Amazon's Thursday night production in 2022, while Fowler was bumped from NFL duty after ESPN acquired Joe Buck and Troy Aikman from Fox, dropping Steve Levy to the No. 2 play-by-play slot.
Now, ESPN is replacing Levy with Fowler as its No. 2 MNF announcer. The news came as ESPN announced a multi-year extension for Fowler. He'll call games with Dan Orlovsky and Louis Riddick; this is Riddick's fifth year calling games for ESPN and Orlovsky's second.
“You look for new challenges and new reasons to kind of stay energized,” Fowler told The Athletic. “I am grateful to do my two favorite sports in college football and tennis, and the NFL is football at the highest level. I’ve been an NFL fan for a long time.”
The new No. 2 crew will call games in Week 2, Week 3, Week 3, Week 14 and Week 18.
The Week 4 will be an Atlanta Falcons-Jacksonville Jaguars tilt airing at 9:30 a.m. ET on Sunday, Oct. 1, from London, which will presumably take Fowler out of commission for college football that week.
The Week 18 game will be Saturday, Jan. 6, two days before Fowler calls the CFP national championship game in Houston.