Kevin Kugler’s first opportunity in television was working the sidelines for a public-TV broadcast of the 1994 Nebraska Shrine Bowl, a high school football all-star game. A college student at Nebraska, he learned an important lesson that day.
At halftime, the assistant producer walked down to the field, approached Kugler and held out her hand.
“Apparently, you weren’t supposed to chew gum on the air,” he said. “I spit out my gum into her hand.”
Kugler has come a long way since then. Among his many national play-by-play jobs, he’s in his sixth season calling NFL games for Fox. He’ll be on the call for the Browns-Bears game Sunday at Soldier Field with analyst Daryl “Moose” Johnston and reporter Allison Williams.
Kugler, 53, also called the Bears’ game against the Saints in Week 7, and he called three of their final nine games last season, including the finale against the Packers that snapped a 10-game skid. In a production meeting before that game with quarterback Caleb Wiliams, Kugler sensed the season had weighed on him.
“He was drained. We could see it,” Kugler said. “I don’t want to say he was ready for the season to end, but I don’t know that he wanted the season to keep going. I think he was ready to reset physically, mentally, emotionally.”
That he has under first-year coach Ben Johnson, whom Kugler got to know when Johnson was the Lions’ offensive coordinator and Kugler called their games.
“When we talked with him,” Kugler said, “he was one of those guys, sometimes you walk into a room and you know this guy has kind of got it figured out, he’s going to be a pretty good head coach someday.”
The same could be said about Kugler as a broadcaster. He’s one of the best in the business among those whom people talk little about. His preparation is meticulous. He begins each game prep with the mundane task of learning the pronunciation of players’ names.
“I’m very diligent about it,” Kugler said. “You lose credibility immediately if you say the name incorrectly. If I’m watching a game, that’s all I hear then. All I hear is the person mispronouncing the name. So I try not to be the person mispronouncing the name.”
Kugler’s calls are easy on the ears, and he works well with anyone sitting next to him, an important trait considering he calls baseball, basketball and football on different TV and radio networks. Broadcast partners have talked about their enjoyment working with him.
In fact, Kugler might’ve worked with Cubs analyst Jim Deshaies at Marquee Sports Network if Jon “Boog” Sciambi wasn’t in the running to replace Len Kasper in late 2020. Kugler, who grew up in Nebraska and became a diehard Cubs fan thanks to their availability on WGN, met with the team and Marquee after Kasper left for the White Sox’ radio booth.
“I had a couple of brief exploratory conversations, but I had hardly done any major-league baseball,” Kugler said. “I found out ‘Boog’ was in the mix before we had the meeting, and I said, ‘I understand where you’re at. If there’s even a small package sometime, that’d be fun to do.’ He was by far the better candidate for that job.”
Kugler calls himself part of “the WGN generation.” He fondly remembers coming home from school, turning on the games and listening to Harry Caray, Steve Stone, Dewayne Staats, Thom Brennaman and others.
“I’d just sit and soak it up,” said Kugler, a devout baseball fan. “I tell people all the time that probably more than half of my baseball knowledge came from Steve Stone, just listening to him teach me baseball as a kid.”
Outside of chewing gum on the air, Kugler didn’t need a ton of teaching as a young broadcaster. His first job was calling the Omaha Racers of the old Continental Basketball Association. Then he called Division II football at Nebraska-Omaha and hosted a sports talk show on KOZN-AM.
His big break came while calling the College World Series preliminary games locally for the station, which serves the Omaha area. Westwood One aired the championship series and had Kugler report from the field. Howard Deneroff, the former executive vice president at Westwood One, was producing the series then, and he liked what he heard from Kugler.
“It’s a very easy listen,” Deneroff said. “That’s the most important thing. But it was also about description, awareness, passion, preparation, all these different things that I listen for. He was good at almost everything.”
In 2006, after working together for a few series, Deneroff hired Kugler to call college football and basketball. Two years later, Kugler became the network’s lead college voice. Today, he calls the CWS championship series, the men’s NCAA Tournament and Final Four and the NFL.
Kugler began calling the NFL on TV under unusual circumstances. After Fox removed Brennaman from its coverage in 2020 for using a homophobic slur on a Reds broadcast, it hired Kugler, who had filled in on games for the network as a longtime broadcaster at Fox-owned Big Ten Network.
“I got a call from [Fox Sports president] Brad Zager,” Kugler said. “He said the circumstances were not ideal, obviously, but he said you’ve earned this, and I really appreciated that. He said you’ve been on our radar a long time.”
He should be on fans’ radars, as well. Perhaps because he’s so polished and professional, Kugler doesn’t draw attention to himself, not that he wants to. In fact, in an era of heightened broadcaster scrutiny, he sets a humorously low bar for himself.
“I just want to make sure that people walk away from the broadcast and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t hate that,’ ” Kugler said. “That’s the standard right now. If they do that, I feel like it’s a job well done.”