National Football Foundation

With the conclusion of the 2013 college football season, announcer Gene Deckerhoff will have called 429 Florida State football games spanning 35 years, and his passionate calls of “Touchdown! Florida State” resonate from Miami to the Panhandle on the Seminole IMG Sports Radio Network.

Since 1989, he also filled the radio play-by-play role for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. As a result, the 68-year-old Deckerhoff navigates a 4-and-a-half hour road trip between Tallahassee and Tampa during Sundays in the fall. It creates a grueling travel schedule that only became possible with the consent of College Football Hall of Fame coach Bobby Bowden, who approved the professional assignment that had the potential to clash with the taping of the coach’s TV show.

“Bobby Bowden was gracious enough to say, ‘Hey, Gene, I think it is great for you to do NFL Games on Sunday and do our games — just keep me awake on the TV show, I will do it anytime you want to,’” remembers Deckerhoff, a 14-time Florida Sportscaster of the Year.

Understandably, he is one of the biggest FSU fans going. The irony is Deckerhoff actually graduated from the University of Florida. He worked his way up the announcing ladder by doing Little League and high school games in various small Florida markets before eventually winding his way to Tallahassee in 1974. He started out as the play-by-play voice of the basketball Seminoles, which he still is, then added football in 1979.

Deckerhoff says he spends 8-12 hours of preparation for each Florida State and Bucs contest: “If you don’t start getting ready in March or April, you can’t do it the way you are supposed to in the fall,” he said of paring over various pre-season college and pro magazines.

He has been inducted into both the State of Florida Sports Hall of Fame and the Florida State University Athletics Hall of Fame. His FSU football announcing career spans most of the school’s major victories. His most memorable game is Florida State’s 46-29 Sugar Bowl victory over Virginia Tech that resulted in the 1999 national championship — not just because of the result.

After being caught outside in a thunderstorm in the French Quarter the night before the game during an FSU pep rally, he developed laryngitis. Early on game day afternoon, during a taping for the pre-game show, Bowden had to fill most of the 12-minute segment with long answers. Deckerhoff could just mutter short questions.

“I finally got a little bit of throat back and was able to broadcast the game,” Deckerhoff said. “But you could tell by the play-by-play clips of that game that I did not have a 20-20 voice.”