NEW ORLEANS – The 86th annual Allstate Sugar Bowl will be the first college football bowl game to be broadcast in 4K adding to a string of television firsts for the venerable annual bowl game in New Orleans.
This year's Allstate Sugar Bowl will be available in 4K as part of ESPN's multi-network presentation. The Allstate Sugar Bowl brought to you in 4K by Samsung QLED will feature native 4K resolution and is available to fans who receive 4K service through Altice, Comcast or DIRECTV. 4K provides superior picture quality; it is a professional production and cinema standard that is exactly four times the previous standard for digital editing and projection. The term "4K" refers to the fact that the horizontal pixel count is roughly four thousand.
The Sugar Bowl has been a part of many significant television firsts including sponsoring the first live television program in New Orleans history (the 1953 Sugar Bowl), becoming the first bowl televised coast to coast in color (1960 Sugar Bowl), breaking the rating record for bowl games with a 25.3 for the 1973 Sugar Bowl and being the first cable television broadcast to surpass 28 million viewers (2015 Sugar Bowl).
This year's Sugar Bowl television broadcast crew will be anchored by play-by-play man Sean McDonough, who will be returning to the Allstate Sugar Bowl broadcast for the second straight year. A Boston native, McDonough graduated from Syracuse University and has been broadcasting college football, college basketball, baseball, NBA, NHL and NCAA hockey for ESPN since 2000.
Todd Blackledge joins McDonough in the booth providing expert color commentary. This will be Blackledge's eighth Sugar Bowl as a color commentator, but he has the distinction of also having played in the game. Playing for Penn State in the 1983 Sugar Bowl, he threw for 228 yards, including a memorable 47-yard fourth-quarter touchdown connection with Gregg Garrity to clinch a 27-23 victory over No. 1 Georgia. That win wrapped up the national championship for the Nittany Lions. Blackledge was inducted into the Sugar Bowl Hall of Fame last year.
Handling sideline duties for ESPN will be Holly Rowe, who is making her seventh Sugar Bowl appearance. A graduate of the University of Utah, Rowe has worked for ESPN since 1997. In addition to college football, she is prominent in ESPN's coverage of men's basketball and softball, as well as the NBA and WNBA.
