Big Ten Network is bringing its original football trio back together Thursday, opening its 20th season at 4:30 p.m. with Dave Revsine, Gerry DiNardo and Howard Griffith on the pregame show before an opening-night doubleheader capped by UAB-Illinois.
For viewers, it is a reunion built around the network’s first cast. Revsine, who has been the face of BTN from the start, said it is especially meaningful to work with DiNardo and Griffith again and that the three will nod to their shared history on air. He added that few people in sports television can say they have stayed together that long.
The timing matters because BTN is not just marking another football season. It is marking 20 years since Aug. 30, 2007, when the network launched with the same three men on the air, and since then it has gone from a startup without Comcast carriage to a channel now carried by every major distributor in the country.
Revsine’s own path helps explain why that launch mattered. He spent more than a decade at as an anchor and play-by-play voice before joining BTN, and he said he had no hesitation about leaving. People at questioned the move and told him he was in a good spot, but he said he was convinced it was the right decision. He said he expected a change, not the kind of reach BTN eventually built.
There was friction at the start, and not just for him. BTN was not on Comcast cable when it launched, a reminder that the network’s rise did not happen smoothly or quickly. That history gives Thursday’s reunion more weight than nostalgia alone: the same on-air team that opened the channel now returns after the network has become part of the national college-sports landscape.
The anniversary will not stop with one pregame show. BTN plans special fall programming that includes B1G Network Season 20: 20 Moments, The B1G Story: Rise of Women’s Sports and B1G Network Season 20: Moments and Memories, with the last program bringing Revsine, DiNardo and Griffith together with Rick Pizzo and Mike Hall to discuss how the network began. The unanswered question is not whether BTN remembers where it started. It is how much of that origin story it can still fit into one season without losing the live audience it spent 20 years building.
