Craig Way Is the Voice of the Longhorns

By Jason Cohen in Features, Sept | Oct 2024 on September 1, 2024 at 1:17 am | No Comments

On Saturday, Aug. 31, millions of Longhorns and fans turned on their TV to watch Quinn Ewers and The University of Texas take on Colorado State in the football season opener. And then a bunch of them hit “mute” and “pause” in order to sync up their picture with a radio or online stream. Let the national TV audiences have their Herbstreit, Fowler, Nessler, or Gus—if you bleed burnt orange, there’s only one Way to enjoy a game.   

Sure, Keith Jackson’s play-by-play of Vince Young’s National Championship–sealing touchdown is one part of the legend of the 2006 Rose Bowl. But the voice that’s branded in our heads, both for the vivid detail radio requires and the history and passion and pent-up emotion of UT having not won a national championship since 1970, was Craig Way’s on the Longhorn Radio Network.   

All the dreams, all the hopes for the National Championship come down to this play. Fourth down and five. Texas at the USC 8. Three wide receivers. Young from the shotgun. Back to throw, Vince looks under pressure. He’ll tuck it and run. Vince to the five! Young, touchdown Texas! Touchdown Vince Young! He’s done it again! Vince Young has given the Longhorns the lead with 19 seconds to play in the game. 

It was not a call Way planned.   

“I’ve always tried to make sure whatever I’m saying is organic in the moment,” Way says, bringing the same golden voice to an interview as he does on-air. “For me, if I try to manufacture something, I don’t think it would sound genuine. Or I would mess it up.”  

That was also the case a few years earlier in Omaha, when the Longhorns won the 2002 College World Series. He remembers running into some fans in the hotel lobby before the game against South Carolina who confidently asked him, “‘Hey, what are you going to say when they win the national title?’ But I didn’t want to plan to say anything.”   

And then it was the ninth inning at Rosenblatt Stadium, and Texas led 12-6. Way’s broadcasting partner, analyst Keith Moreland, BA ’91, had already gone down to the field to be ready for a postgame interview. While Longhorns closer Huston Street gave up a lead-off single, it was immediately erased by a double play.   

“So now all of a sudden, there’s two outs, and it popped in my mind. ‘Oh, my goodness, this is about to end. You’d better think of something!’” Way says. He’d often heard Moreland talk about what it felt like for Cliff Gustafson’s 1975 team to fly back into Austin after winning it, seeing the UT Tower glowing orange from the plane.   

“And right as that popped into my mind, the next guy for South Carolina hit the ground ball to first, Jeff Ontiveros picks it up, and it just comes out … ”  

He’ll step on the bag. Light the Tower orange! The Texas Longhorns are coming home as college baseball’s national champions!

Light the Tower became the name of the talk radio show Way co-hosted for several years—and he still does one, Mondays through Fridays 2–5 p.m., though it’s now called The Craig Way Show. The 64-year-old is a man with one broadcasting career but many, many jobs. He’s in his 23rd year as UT football’s play-by-play announcer, with 10 years as the analyst before that. Come November, it will be 24 years for men’s basketball (with nine years doing color before). His longest play-by-play tenure is with women’s basketball: 28 years. In July, Way was named the National Sports Media Association’s Texas Sportscaster of the Year for the second time.   

“The one thing that always stands out in my mind that makes Craig Way one of the all-time legends in his field is his incredible work ethic,” says Longhorns men’s basketball head coach Rodney Terry, whose relationship with Way goes back to his years as a Rick Barnes assistant. “It’s off the charts. If there is a Longhorns athletic event, he’s going to be there, he’s going to be the voice, and he’s going to have a passion to do it. Rain, sleet, snow, sick or not sick, it doesn’t matter. He’s just driven to be the best, and there’s no one that delivers our voice better than Craig.”  

If you’re one of the millions of people in the state who did not attend (or otherwise root for) The University of Texas, there is an entirely different Craig Way who’s the “Voice of Texas”—as in, the voice of Texas high school football. He has hosted or co-hosted some version of what is now the Bally Sports Southwest High School Scoreboard Live show every Friday night since 1985, with just a few years interruption from 2000 to 2002, even as he’s always also getting ready for that weekend’s Longhorns game. In 2016, Way was inducted into the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame (which is for coaches and players, too). And each December, he calls as many as seven of the 12 state championship games over a span of four days, as Texas Monthly’s Jeff Miller documented in a 2022 profile. In that story, Dallas Cowboys announcer Brad Sham said that Way would rather do that than call a Super Bowl, an observation Way confirmed. Luckily, nobody has ever asked him to choose between covering high school football or covering UT.

To rejigger a famous saying, Craig Way didn’t attend The University of Texas, but he got to the Forty Acres as soon as he could. He followed his parents to the Dallas area when he was 18 (so the traditional version of the saying is also true), and spent one semester at Texas Tech (“one semester was enough,” he says) before ending up in the broadcast journalism program at the University of North Texas, where he was mentored by Mean Green announcer Bill Mercer, who also called the Cowboys and, even more infamously, the Von Erichs’ World Class Championship Wrestling.  

Way had already caught the bug at his high school in Jamestown, North Carolina, which had its own closed-circuit TV station with a daily, 30-minute newscast during homeroom. He was the sports anchor and did his very first live play-by-play at age 14, a moment that’s still etched into his memory. “The homeroom basketball tournament championship,” he says. “Mr. Busick’s homeroom defeated Mrs. Unger’s home room, 21-14. I remember doing the play-by-play on that, and I really liked that an awful lot.”  

His love affair with Texas high school football started in the fall of 1980, when he went to a Lake Highlands–W.T. White game as a newspaper stringer. By then he’d also started working for the Dallas AM radio station KRLD; still in college, Way used to wake up at 2:30 a.m. in Denton, drive to Dallas to work a 4–8 a.m. shift at the radio station, and then go back for class. He started full-time at KRLD in 1985, which is also when the first version of his Friday night high school scoreboard show began.  

While still at KRLD, Way also worked for the Southwest Conference radio network as the in-studio anchor. In his first year, the conference games had just a single broadcast, with an announcer from each team (the home guy would do play-by-play, with the visitor on color). That—and the entire SWC radio network—ended in 1989, with schools doing their own thing, but Way stayed on with producer Host Communications doing halftime shows for multiple schools across the country, Texas included. Then, at the end of 1991, he was asked to fill in for Bill Schoening as Longhorns analyst for that year’s Texas–Texas A&M game.   

Schoening was off with the basketball team at the pre-season National Invitation Tournament, but what Way didn’t know at the time was it was also an audition. Schoening was about to move over to play-by-play, and Way would join him. That duo spent the next decade together (10 football seasons, nine basketball) before Schoening went to the San Antonio Spurs (where he remains today) in 2001, which is when Way took on the play-by-play for men’s basketball, with football following in the 2002 season. For many of those years Way was still also working for KRLD and commuting from the Metroplex; he finally left that job in 1996 and moved to Austin the next year, which is also when he started calling women’s basketball.   

In his 2022 book Stories, Sports, and Songs, Schoening titled his chapter about Way “The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.” He is one of the many friends and colleagues who continues to marvel at just how many games (and different sports) Way covers, as well as the vast store of information in his head. “I always considered myself a hard worker, but Craig took that term to an entirely new level,” Schoening wrote.    

It’s something Terry notices during every pre-game interview, when Way comes in with his “call sheet” or line-up card. “When you talk about the all-time great broadcasters—Dick Enberg, Jim Nantz, and Bill Raftery—those guys are prepared,” Terry says. “They are ready to do their job at an incredible level. Craig is all about attention to detail. At Texas, we have elite people around us in every domain, and Craig has been that from day one.”  

Way’s brain is also its own Texas road atlas. Everyone who has ever worked with Way has a story about his love of small towns and farm-to-market roads. “It makes me smile to think that I’ve traveled most of the farm-to-market roads in this state,” Way says. “They didn’t have farm-to-market roads in North Carolina.” His favorite is not all that far from Austin: 165, which runs between Henly and Blanco west of Dripping Springs. “You get a great vista of the Hill Country coming over a rise.”

Through it all, Way has also been a family man. He has four children, with four grandchildren from one of his daughters. His first wife, Laurie, died of cancer in 2016 after 30 years of marriage. Now remarried, Way and his wife Linda take a two-week family vacation to the same spot every year on the coast of his native North Carolina after baseball season ends. It’s typically his only vacation of the year. He’s proud to say he’s not much of a golfer. “That’s another old sports broadcasting thing,” he says. “You can tell how hard a broadcaster works by his golf game.”  

As a play-by-play man, Way’s first job is to say what’s happening, staking out a middle ground between being overly dispassionate and being in the tank (a “homer”). “What I do is an extension of what the fans are thinking and feeling in the season,” he says. “It’s my job to enunciate it. To broadcast it. Can people tell that I want Texas to win? Absolutely. They should be able to. But it’s important not to get so caught up in sharing the moment from the Texas perspective that you lose perspective on being able to tell what happened during the game.”  

“You want your play-by-play guy to be very professional, and Craig is passionate,” says former football head coach Mack Brown, Life Member. “He sets a really high standard. There aren’t many as good as he is, and none that care as much as he does.”  

Way says he’s liked and gotten along with every coach he’s worked with over the years. “It didn’t always work out for the coach for whatever reason, but every single one I’ve worked with has been great,” he says.   

He fondly recalls his pre-game interviews with the late Augie Garrido, Life Member, when the baseball coach would sometimes go five, six, even seven minutes answering just one question. “He’s just going—talking about the philosophy of things, really engaging baseball stuff,” Way says. “And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way I can use all this.’ And then he’d get to the end of it and say, ‘Now, I don’t know if I answered your question, but … ’”  

Naturally, Brown remembers Way’s call of the Young touchdown in Pasadena above all. But another one that stands out happened on a certain Thanksgiving night in College Station 13 years ago, when Justin Tucker’s time-expiring kick gave UT a 27-25 win over Texas A&M.   

One last time, the Texas Longhorns have broken the hearts of the Aggies of Texas A&M.   

“When he made that call, we didn’t know that there would ever be another Texas–Texas A&M game, and he absolutely nailed it,” Brown says. “That one’s about as passionate and memorable as anything, and that was the last game until now.”   

Even then, Way didn’t figure that the rivalry was over. “I was referring to the fact that it was the last time they were ever going to meet as Big 12 opponents,” he says. “I figured that somewhere down the road they’d get there again. I often refer to it like the show Friends, like Ross and Rachel: ‘They were on a break!’”

And now, it’s time to make more memories.

At UT we always hear the goal is to compete for a national championship every year, but the key word is “compete.” Be in the position to do it, with the right coaches and players, and the biggest moment should eventually arrive. With Steve Sarkisian, Terry, Vic Schaefer, and now, new baseball coach Jim Schlossnagle in Austin, Way figures there’s a legitimate chance for him to call any one of four national championship games in the coming seasons. He already considers Schaefer and Terry’s initial March Madness appearances (both surprise runs to the Elite Eight in 2020 and 2023, respectively) to be among his career highlights.   

But first, of course, it’s football season. Like the rest of Longhorn Nation, Way thinks UT has its next great coach in Sark. “He gets it,” Way says. “In so many ways. He understands what it takes to build a program, and he’ll be the first to tell you it’s from his own experiences. Both the pluses and minuses. His time spent with Pete Carroll and his time spent with Nick Saban mean he understands how to maintain that level of excellence. He also gets it in terms of how he deals with his players, his coaching staff, and I think also alumni.”  

Not only are expectations high after last year’s College Football Playoff, and for Ewers’ junior season, but it’s a whole new day and dawn for the program and for college football—the first year in the Southeastern Conference and the first year with a 12-team CFP field. Unsurprisingly, given his passion for the high school postseason, Way is excited that an expanded playoff is finally happening at college football’s highest level.

“I love it,” he says. “I’m a ‘more is more’ guy. Always have been. I like 12 in. I’d be OK with 16. I think it’s great for the sport.”   

Probably best to leave it at that though. This year, with the 12-team format, the first round of the College Football Playoff starts Dec. 20. If there were any more teams, and it started a week earlier, it would be in direct conflict with Way’s beloved Texas high school state championship games.   

“Yeah, there may be a little bit of crossover, that’s for sure,” Way says. “That’s a chance we’ll just have to take.”

CREDITS: From top, Matt Wright-Steel (10); Texas Athletics (2)

Tags: baseball, football, texas athletics, volleyball