Tim Brando

Induction Year: 2020

University: UL-Monroe

Shreveport sports broadcaster Tim Brando, who has been part of the Fox Sports stable of announcers since 2014, has been a studio host and play-by-play announcer for ESPN, CBS, Raycom/Jefferson Broadcasting, Sirius/XM, and Turner Broadcasting since the mid-1980s. He has received a wide range of national honors for his broadcasting career. His work has earned him four regional Emmy Awards and critical acclaim from national media writers and outlets.

Brando has been honored with the Jake Ward Award in 2009 for outstanding promotion of intercollegiate athletics by the College Sports Information Directors of America, and the 2014 Lindsey Nelson Award given by the Knoxville Quarterback Club. In 2018, he received the Broadcast Legend Award presented by the Lombardi Honors, only the third such honoree behind Dick Enberg and Verne Lundquist. That year Brando also was presented Richard M. Uray-Alpha Epsilon Rho Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Broadcasting Society-Alpha Epsilon Rho, awarded to an individual, company, or organization that best represents excellence in the field of electronic media. Past recipients of the Uray award include Walter Cronkite and Bob Costas.

He also has been honored with recognitions from his home state, including the Independence Bowl in Shreveport naming Brando its’ Sportsperson of the Year in 1992 and giving him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.  He is also an inductee into the Northwest Louisiana Walk of Stars in Shreveport (2016) and the Louisiana Italian American Sports Hall of Fame, earning their Buddy D Media Award (2019).

In 1971, at the age of 14, Brando worked in a press box for the very first time, calling Neville High School football on KLIC radio in Monroe alongside his father, Shreveport broadcast pioneer Hub Brando.  Brando brought several speech, debate and broadcasting awards to Fair Park High School in Shreveport while earning a scholarship to Northeast Louisiana University (now ULM) in 1975.

As an 18-year-old, Brando worked the sports desk at KTAL-TV in Shreveport, spun rock records at KROK-FM radio, and called Centenary College basketball on 50,000-watt KWKH-AM alongside future Louisiana Sports Hall of Famer Jim Hawthorne.

After college, Brando moved south in 1978, honing skills that would serve him for the rest of his career.  Brando’s nightly sports talk radio show on WIBR was the first of its kind in Baton Rouge, and his play-by-play of high school football earned him the 1981 Louisiana Association of Broadcasters Best Play-By-Play Award, beating out college broadcasts with wider audiences.

During this time, Brando began his association with the fledgling TigerVision, becoming the voice of LSU basketball.  After a brief sojourn at WGSO Radio in New Orleans, Brando returned to Baton Rouge to become sports director at WAFB TV.  It was during this time that Brando began one of his favorite jobs, calling college basketball for Raycom/Jefferson Pilot from 1983 until the creation of the ACC network in 2019.

After earning his stripes in South Louisiana, Brando became one of the second wave of sportscasters who joined ESPN in the mid-1980s. In addition to being a SportsCenter anchor from 1986-94, Brando was the original host of ESPN Gameday, the college football pre-game show that is now a national institution, and the network’s NCAA Tournament basketball coverage.

Brando made the decision to depart ESPN headquarters in Bristol and return his family to his hometown to raise his two daughters in 1990, where he remains headquartered to this day. His career continued upward as he reconnected with Louisiana, and as his stature rose, he remained a prominent walking and talking advertisement for his home state.

After leaving ESPN, Brando earned a ring in 1995 calling Braves games for Turner Sports during the Braves’ run to the World Series championship, before making the biggest move of his career to that point, working for 18 seasons at CBS Sports. Beginning in 1998, he was host of the CBS Sports College Football Today studio show, and did NFL and occasional SEC games for the network regularly from 1998-2002, along with calling  NCAA Tournament basketball play by play throughout his time with CBS.

From 2011-2015, Brando originated a CBS Sports/Sirius XM simulcast college sports talk show from Shreveport, an offshoot of a longer-running Tim Brando Show which ran on Sporting News Radio and other national distribution channels beginning in 2001.

In 2014, Brando signed a multi-year deal to become a play-by-play commentator in football and basketball for Fox Sports, where he enjoys mentoring the rising generation of sports journalists.

Throughout his career, Brando has covered 26 individual sports, 25 of them while at ESPN, which is still considered the most ever by anyone at the network.  He has worked games for the NFL, MLB and NBA.  He has covered football and/or basketball in the Southeastern Conference, Big 10, PAC 12, Big XII, Big East, ACC, and American Athletic Conference.

Brando’s coverage of the booster cheating scandal at Southern Methodist University in the mid-1980s was among some of the enterprise reporting that led to the disbanding of the Southwest Conference and SMU’s death penalty punishment in college football. Brando also displayed his reporting skills and calm under pressure during his coverage of the SEC semifinal tournament game in Atlanta in March of 2008, when a tornado struck the area, suspending the game. Brando became a news reporter, describing the scene and the consequences of the tornado for more than an hour to the Raycom Sports network audience.

Brando has served as the master of ceremonies for several Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremonies and events, along with lending considerable time to his hometown Independence Bowl Foundation as a master of ceremonies and volunteer.