Fox Sports has settled on its new No. 2 college football voice.
According to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, Connor Onion has been tapped as Jason Benetti’s successor and will pair with analyst Robert Griffin III once the season begins.
Tim Brando, another Fox voice who might have seemed a natural fit given his seniority, was asked by Front Office Sports this spring — after inking a multi-year extension — whether he considered himself a candidate to replace Benetti, and demurred, saying Fox hadn’t approached him about it and that “they’ll get to it when they get to it.” They got to Onion, instead.
Onion made his MLB debut in April 2024, calling Rangers-Astros for FS1, part of a broader body of work for Fox, ESPN, and Big Ten Network that includes college football, college basketball, and now a step up to the network’s No. 2 college football chair.
Onion’s rise has been building for a couple of seasons in AA’s own reader rankings. He and Mark Helfrich called Fox’s No. 3 college football booth together in both 2024 and 2025, and in AA’s 2024 announcer rankings, readers praised Onion specifically as a “future star” and “a star in the making,” even as the pairing settled for a middling overall grade. That trend continued the following year. In AA’s 2025 rankings, Helfrich drew criticism from readers for mumbling and seeming “lost a lot of the time,” while nearly all of the booth’s praise went to Onion, described as “extremely knowledgeable,” someone who “does his homework,” and, most tellingly given this week’s news, a broadcaster who “will be the lead voice of a network soon.”
Griffin, his new booth partner, has his own path back to relevance in sports television after a rocky exit from ESPN. He joined the Worldwide Leader in 2021 to work Monday Night Countdown, only to be let go three years later for what were reportedly budgetary reasons, alongside fellow ESPN cuts Zach Lowe and Sam Ponder. The departure drew a split reaction inside Bristol, with Paul Finebaum defending Griffin, whom he deemed “completely different” from most analysts and suggesting ESPN had erred in letting him go, while Stephen A. Smith called Griffin “passive-aggressive” and questioned how well-liked he actually was internally, even as Smith said he’d personally wanted Griffin to stay on First Take.
Fox scooped him up in 2025 to replace Brock Huard, who’d stepped away from the No. 2 analyst chair to spend more time with his family and coach his son’s high school team. Griffin brought his own podcast, Outta Pocket with RGIII, as part of the deal and expanded into NFL play-by-play duties for Fox by December, calling a Panthers-Saints game alongside Benetti.
Benetti had joined Fox in 2022 after 11 years at ESPN, initially pairing with Huard as Fox’s No. 2 college football voice while continuing to call White Sox games locally and MLB nationally for NBC’s Sunday Peacock package. His workload only grew from there, adding NFL assignments, and he eventually took over Detroit Tigers play-by-play duties in 2024 while keeping his Fox college football role fully intact. NBC lured him away this past March to become the new lead voice of Sunday Night Baseball. Benetti has said the full picture of what else he’ll call for NBC, given the network’s sprawling portfolio that includes Big Ten football, Notre Dame games, and multiple college basketball conferences, is still being worked out.
Whether Onion can grow into Benetti’s range remains to be seen, but based on how AA’s own readers have already sized him up, Fox clearly isn’t worried about finding out.
