Established pro sports leagues don’t often give birth to a separate offshoot league.
But that’s what PBR (Professional Bull Riders), a sport formed 29 years ago, is doing tonight in Cheyenne, Wyoming when the bucking chutes burst open to introduce the first regular season bull riding games in the new PBR Team Series. CBS Sports Network will carry the action live at 10 p.m. ET.
The basic concept of the Team Series is bull riding games that pit two teams of five riders against one another. Stay on the bull, get a score. Get thrown off “before the whistle,” or touch the bull, and the score is zero. During a game, each team gets five “outs” – the chance to earn a score. Each qualified ride score is added up. The team with the highest score wins that game.
Fans will get to see four five-on-five games each event day. Each game takes about 25 minutes.
There are 112 PBR Team Series games across the 10-event regular season, culminating in a 3-day championship in Las Vegas in November. All the action will be carried on the CBS Television Network (the Sunday Game of the Week), Paramount+, CBS Sports Network, and Pluto TV, the world’s leading streaming ad-supported TV service.
PBR’s bold line extension is an attempt to modernize and broaden the sport’s appeal, even as the new format debuts in a traditional rodeo hub like Cheyenne.
“The Magic City on the Plains” is described in the new book Love & Try: Stories of Gratitude and Grit from Professional Bull Riding as “where the Union Pacific Railroad laid its tracks and spawned a bustling boomtown teeming with dance halls and saloons, an edgy destination for the hard living who’d take what they believed was theirs for the taking, where men and women alike slept with more than one pistol under the pillow.”
You can almost hear the barrelhouse piano interrupted by crashing whiskey bottles before the big fight.
Cheyenne may still feel like a dusty throwback frontier town (not to me as I was there Friday and left pretty impressed), but make no mistake, PBR’s new team league is a forward-looking move to pay the bull riders more (they were previously only paid when scoring on their bulls but now have team contracts) and to make the sport easier to follow and more of a draw to sports fans who love rooting for teams.
Eight home cities will have bull riding teams to cheer for: The Ariat Texas Rattlers (based in Fort Worth); Arizona Ridge Riders (Glendale); Austin Gamblers; Carolina Cowboys (Winston-Salem); Kansas City Outlaws; Missouri Thunder (Ridgedale); Nashville Stampede; and Oklahoma Freedom (Oklahoma City).
PBR wanted a new look to differentiate the team competition from the individual Unleash The Beast competition which has been around for nearly three decades, finished its season by crowning a new champion in Fort Worth in May, and will once again fire up after the Teams season concludes.
The TV presentation of the new team league – the window for how most fans experience any sport – will present a new viewing experience, starting with the voice calling the action.
Many fans tuning into CBS Sports Network tonight to watch often brutal man-versus-beast matchups where testosterone coats the air like the humidity in Baton Rouge in mid-August will be surprised to hear a woman’s voice calling the rides and wrecks.
Kate Harrison – who studied broadcast journalism at USC then went on to host shows for the PAC-12 Network, USC Football pregame radio show for ESPN, a morning show for Radio Disney, and then PBR on CBS as a sideline reporter– is the play-by-play voice of the new league.
This news of a female stepping in as network television host, play-by-play voice, and a primary face of the new league is a first for any major male-dominated professional sport.
Harrison reported from the PBR World Finals in May while she was 8 months pregnant. She first appeared in front of a camera at 7 years old doing stunts for television shows such as “The Magnificent Seven.” She’s as cowboy as they come.
Another cutting-edge feature of the broadcast: Harrison will call the action from between the bucking chutes at dirt level, merely feet from the mayhem unfolding on the dirt.
In a break from the way major sports are televised, the audience inside the arena, as well as the TV audience at home, will be able to hear her calls.
Additionally, award-winning television and radio broadcaster Allen Bestwick will join the league’s broadcasts as a sideline analyst, embedded with one team right at the bucking chutes.
Over a storied 40-year career, Bestwick’s resume includes serving as a television play-by-play announcer or host for the Indianapolis 500, Daytona 500, U.S. Open tennis tournament, Wimbledon, college football, college basketball, golf, and NASCAR.
He is one of three people, along with Jim McKay and Keith Jackson, who have called both the Indianapolis 500 and the Daytona 500.
When fans hear Allen Bestwick’s voice, they know they’re tuning to a world-class sports broadcast.
When they hear Harrison, they’ll know they’re watching something new and different.
In recent years, with the help of its broadcast partners and more major brands climbing on board, PBR has been making a creative play for acceptance as a mainstream sport.
Now the league is putting bull riders on teams and packaging the broadcast anew. Can this be the path to finally breaking through?
The PBR Team Series is interesting viewing for a host of reasons…including its refreshing new hosts.
