About

In May of 2022, JP Kirby of the 506 website (the guy that makes the NFL broadcast distribution maps that we all look for to see which game will air where on Sundays) shut down the forum.  The forum operated on older software and the decision was made to move to a newer platform.  In their forum over many years their users had compiled the most comprehensive resource of announcer listings going back all the way to the earliest sports broadcasts of the 1940s.  I was a very minor contributor to the forum, but like many others I was very much appreciative of the vastness of this resource.

In the two years since, J.P. has continued to post the distribution maps on his website at 506sports.com,  the discussion element of the forums has moved to Discord, but the bulk of the announcer listings from the forums (For example the year-by-year lists of the football, baseball, basketball announcers) was preserved in a archive where trusted users continue to update it up to the present and will continue to do so into the future.

A lot of the other threads in the forums that were shut down contained a myriad of predictions, discussions, general chit-chat and a whole lot of useless banter.  (At one point in announcing the changes, JP or one of his administrators called the bulk of the content of the forums a "cesspool", as many internet forums tend to be.)  Within that cesspool, there were a lot of useful single topic threads that users cultivated and contributed to that are now gone.  

For instance, there was a thread "Completing the rounds" where users kept track of which teams aired in which markets throughout a given year.  Another thread tracked the results when NFL teams scored a late touchdown and had a choice to go for one to tie the game or to risk going for two and going for the win.  Many of those threads did not survive the shut down of the forum.  They kept the main research of the Announcer Listings in the Archive and for that I am grateful.

But one of the lessor threads in that forum, which I (user JJ372 in the forum) created and maintained was a team-by-team list of NFL Preseason Announcers.  In 2013 and 2014 I posted a main thread and a lot of users added additional information which I updated to some extent for the next couple of years.  Users have continued to add to it, and there are a lot of posts from 2014-2021 that I did not update into the main post.

So I am going to attempt to re-create that post here on this website and I hope that over time any former users of the506 forum that were interested in this topic will find their way here and we can continue to collaborate and compile this information.

Rob Holecko

"JJ372"