Kate Scott to become first woman to call NFL game for Westwood One

Sports broadcaster Kate Scott will add another first next month in what has been a career of sports broadcasting firsts.

Scott has been assigned to call the Vikings versus Steelers game on Sept. 28 for Westwood One, the official network audio broadcast partner of the NFL. According to Westwood One Sports vice president and executive producer Mike Eaby, Scott will break a sports broadcast barrier as the first female play-by-play announcer to call an NFL regular-season game for Westwood One. She will be partnered with former Vikings tight end Kyle Rudolph. The Steelers-Vikings will be held at Croke Park in Dublin, Ireland, as part of the NFL’s international series.  (The game will broadcast exclusively on NFL Network with Joe Davis, Greg Olsen, Pam Oliver and Jamie Erdahl as far as the TV side.)

Scott has served as the preseason play-by-play announcer for the Seattle Seahawks since 2023, and the assignment works because it comes before her Sixers schedule gets going.

“Kate did one of our US Soccer broadcasts this summer, and I was impressed with the way she quickly went back into radio mode despite doing mostly TV,” said Eaby. “We needed an announcer for our NFL Dublin game and knowing that Kate does a terrific job on Seahawks preseason games and did a few 49ers preseason games on the radio in the past, she was an obvious choice. Dublin falls in Week 4 of the NFL season, so I knew it was before any of her Sixers stuff gets going. We’re looking for announcers who inform and entertain, and Kate excels at both.”

(As far as Westwood One booth history, give a shoutout to Lesley Visser, who was part of a group of rotating color analysts for Westwood One’s Monday Night Football schedule in 2002.)

Scott is most known as the play-by-play voice of the Sixers — she was the second woman to hold a full-time game-calling role for an NBA team behind Lisa Byington of the Bucks, whose appointment was announced a few days before Scott’s.

As far as firsts, Scott was the first woman to call football for the Pac-10 network in 2017. She broke a local barrier as the first woman to call the NFL on the radio in 2016 when she did NFL preseason games for the San Francisco 49ers. In 2020, she was the play-by-play broadcaster for the first NHL broadcast (Blackhawks-Blues) produced solely by women in the U.S. As far as a broad picture: Scott is believed to be the only woman to have done play-by-play for the NFL, NHL, NBA, NCAA Division 1 football and the Olympics.

Westwood One’s lead broadcast team remains Kevin Harlan and Kurt Warner. They will call Monday Night Football and Super Bowl LX. This will be Harlan’s 16th full season for Westwood One and Warner’s 12th season as an analyst. Kevin Kugler will be the lead voice on Thursday nights, with Devin McCourty and Ross Tucker rotating as analysts for Thursday Night Football. Ryan Radtke and Mike Golic Sr. call Sunday Night Football.

(Photo: Jesse D. Garrabrant / Getty Images)