Minnesota’s Brad Nessler looks forward to calling the Gophers vs. Penn State

Brad Nessler apologized for dropping the phone in the middle of the interview. Van Brocklin, one of the three cats he and his wife Nancy have in their home in Duluth, Ga., had jumped on Nessler’s desk and startled him.

Yes, Van Brocklin. As in Norm Van Brocklin, Hall of Fame football player. The Nessler family has a tradition of naming their felines after hall of famers — there’s been a Butkus, a Nitschke, an Elway and a Lambert, among others. So it was fitting that Van Brocklin, whose namesake was also the first coach of the Vikings, interrupted his owner while talking Minnesota football.

Nessler, the lead play-by-play announcer for CBS on its Big Ten football telecasts, is a native of St. Charles, Minn. – about 25 miles east of Rochester. He will be back in his home state to call the Gophers vs. fourth-ranked Penn State on Saturday at Huntington Bank Stadium. It will be Nessler’s first Gophers home game since calling their 29-26 loss to Michigan on October 31, 2015, on ESPN.

Nessler is looking forward to his return to Minnesota, “especially after everyone has been texting me all day with the snow on their tires,” he joked Wednesday. Nessler has been reunited with analyst Gary Danielson, his old ABC/ESPN partner dating back to the 1990s, for CBS’ first year with the 18-team Big Ten. “This will be our first taste of Big Ten football in November,” he said, pointing to Saturday’s forecast for temperatures in the 30s.

Nessler’s Minnesota roots run deep — from St. Charles to what was then called Mankato State College and to the Vikings as their radio voice in 1988 and ’89. “When I got the Vikings job, my dad buttoned his shirt, he was so proud,” Nessler said.

From age 11 or 12, Nessler wanted to be a sportscaster, and he remembers the early days calling high school games in the Mankato area, when he was his own “producer, engineer, spotter and stats guy. I had to trying to climb a telephone pole to hook up a phone line,” he said. “This is crazy, and I’m making $50 on a Friday night when I should be wooing my future wife at that time.”

His early influences included a who’s who of Minnesota-based talent in the field: Ray Christensen, Ray Scott, Herb Carneal and Halsey Hall. His first major network role came in 1990 when he worked on the NFL, college football and college basketball for CBS.

Nessler is known for his work on SEC games for CBS, and the move to the Big Ten has been a homecoming of sorts. He has renewed friendships from more than 30 years ago, when ABC/ESPN had the Big Ten rights.