CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It’s 6:30 a.m. on Monday and Eric Mac Lain is gearing up to make his debut as a fill-in co-host of Packer and Durham, ACC Network’s flagship morning show. And he has a small problem.
He can’t hear his producer.
A storm has just come through, impacting the Charlotte area and therefore Mark Packer’s basement, where the show is broadcast from each morning. Something is wrong with the TV infrastructure after the power outage and Mac Lain’s earpiece isn’t connecting.
Advertisement
Thirty minutes remain until he has to go live. Wes Durham, Packer’s usual co-host, is traveling, and Mac Lain’s never done this part of the job before.
“Hello, hello, hello — mic check, mic check,” Mac Lain says.
Nothing.
Then, he starts to hear music.
“(But) they can’t hear us,” he said. “So we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh.'”
Time is ticking down.
Eventually, they decide to call Bristol, Conn., the home of ESPN headquarters, and together come up with a makeshift solution: the show begins with Mac Lain using his normal Apple headphones to communicate with producers via his cell phone. Packer is on his phone, too.
“It was hilarious,” Mac Lain said a couple hours later at his lunch spot of choice, a trendy plant-based restaurant in uptown. “It’s so funny the magic that is TV.”
This is the former Clemson offensive lineman’s new normal.
Technology can be unpredictable, live television can be chaotic and Mac Lain is still learning the ropes of his new job.
The fledgling ACC Network announced him as its first football analyst hire about five months ago, bringing Clemson fans to their feet for an ovation at the Tigers’ annual April spring game.
This time a year ago, Mac Lain was living in Greenville, S.C., and working in marketing.
“Imagine preparing for a test that you don’t know the test,” he said of the initial growing pains. “You don’t know. It’s so overwhelming because you’ve never done it before and you’ve got 14 teams, two divisions, 400 million different people — you have to learn their name, all this crazy stuff. So I think at first it was a little overwhelming.”
And now?
“It’s been so much fun.”
(Bradley Moore / Clemson Athletics)To understand Mac Lain and how he got to where he is now, you first have to understand where he was before all of this. Before ESPN stunned him when an executive tracked him down at the national championship game in January and asked if he would consider flying to Bristol for an interview. Before broadcasting became his career.
Advertisement
Mac Lain, a 26-year-old native of Hope Mills, N.C., near Fayetteville, was a four-star tight end out of high school, having graduated in 2011. Ranked No. 9 at his position nationally by 247Sports Composite rankings, he was also the No. 6 player in the state and the No. 188 player in the country.
A slew of schools, including plenty of ACC and SEC programs, vied for his services.
But he ultimately chose Clemson, having connected with Dan Brooks, the Tigers’ former defensive line coach who is now retired.
When he arrived, the Tigers made Mac Lain an offensive lineman — an assignment he embraced, abandoning tight end for the sake of coach Dabo Swinney’s overall program.
“He was just one of those guys that was completely committed to excellence in every area of his life,” Swinney said last month. “And just a guy I’m really proud of.”
As his career progressed, Mac Lain became one of the most recognizable faces of Clemson football, thanks to his contagious charisma. He also became a team captain as an eventual first-team All-ACC selection. He played for the Tigers from 2011-15, taking part in two conference championships, playing in Clemson’s first national championship berth under Swinney against Alabama and leaving the program with more wins to his name (46) than any other single player in Clemson history at the time.
When he realized a run in the NFL wasn’t in his future, Mac Lain accepted a job as an account executive at JMI Sports, Clemson’s official partner for multimedia rights and corporate sponsorships.
He had no idea where it would take him.
Mac Lain’s gregarious personality was made for a job with people, and with JMI Sports, came myriad opportunities for him to get some multimedia experience — radio hits, television spots and interviews.
It also kept him connected to his alma mater, where he met his wife, Kaki.
Advertisement
“We’re basically selling Clemson sponsorship,” he said, explaining his role at JMI. “And so with that, comes different multimedia rights like radio broadcasts for every sport that they have it (with), which is football, basketball, women’s basketball, baseball and then some coaches’ show and some coaches’ TV shows.
“I’ve done a lot of radio throughout my whole life. And so it kind of escalated.”
Indeed, as a product of how natural Mac Lain was on the radio, Clemson’s flagship station, WCCP, reached out. Kelly Gramlich co-hosts a daily show on the station and is a fellow former Clemson student-athlete, playing basketball for the Tigers through 2014 as a 3-point specialist. She served on the university’s athletic leadership counsel with Mac Lain and remembers meeting him when he was still just a freshman. She teased her new friend about the Clemson tattoo she instantly noticed on his calf.
“What if you transfer?” she’d joke.
As 2018 rolled around and the station was tossing around ideas for how it wanted to handle its “5th Quarter Show,” the station’s pregame tailgate broadcast on Saturdays in the fall, it was Gramlich who initially pitched the idea to the station that Mac Lain come aboard as a co-host.
He was smart. He knew Clemson football. And listeners already loved him.
It was an easy sell.
“He was so articulate. I kind of knew it from seeing him talk to us in the media. He even introduced (vice president) Joe Biden when Biden was here on campus speaking when he was a player. That shows the type of trust people had,” said William Qualkinbush, who ultimately co-hosted that pregame show with Mac Lain and who also co-hosts with Gramlich daily.
“He was always very thoughtful about the game and after one or two 5th Quarter shows, our prep was basically Mac would hand me the script … and then we barely even talked before we got on the air because you wanted to save it. We didn’t need to prep. For somebody with very little experience actually doing that, I found him to be very polished in that role.”
Advertisement
Qualkinbush wasn’t alone in that assessment.
The more radio he did, the more Mac Lain would field questions from Clemson fans or those around college football about whether he wanted to ever chase down broadcasting as a career.
‘This is pretty fun. I like it,” he remembers thinking.
“But at the end of the day, people would ask me all the time, ‘Why don’t you pursue this?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t want to.’ I liked it as a hobby. Not as a job. At least I thought, right?”
That was before ESPN came calling.
It was also before he accidentally blew off the World Wide Leader — twice.
Mac Lain was in California for Clemson’s eventual national championship rout of Alabama in January, there with family to see the Tigers.
They had plans to explore the sights on the west coast.
And then he got a text message.
“I get a text from this guy and he says, ‘Hey, this is so-and-so with ESPN. Are you in California? I’d love to meet up,”’ Mac Lain explained. “So, being a former player, I Google him.”
Nothing comes up.
“He’s a ghost,” Mac Lain continued. “I can’t find anything about him and that’s all he said. So I’m thinking it’s about the game. He wants to know my thoughts, he’s writing a story.”
The former offensive guard had naturally been a hot commodity all week in media circles. He thinks that between the likes of ESPN Radio, Sirius Radio and XM Radio, as well as print reporters picking his brain, he must have done at least 50 interviews in the days leading up to college football’s two giants squaring off for the fifth straight year.
So when he got yet another request on the Thursday before the Monday night game while he was out exploring …
“I blow this guy off,” Mac Lain said, admitting he then Googled him for a second time. “I’m like, ‘No, man. I’m kind of busy. Maybe we can meet up later.’
Advertisement
“He texted me again on Friday or Saturday. That’s when we were actually in Carmel. So I blow him off again: ‘Hey. Can’t do it. Too busy. Maybe we’ll try again later.’”
The man appeared to understand.
But still, he tried one more time — on the Monday of the game, texting Mac Lain for a third time to ask if they could chat on the field during pregame warmups.
Hoping to participate in some of the pregame festivities with family and friends, Mac Lain didn’t want to commit to much, but finally agreed to meet up.
“He’s on the field, I’m on the field, I’m looking for him and he says, ‘Hey, we’re about we’re about to do some TV, I’ll be over in a second,’” Mac Lain said. “I’m like, ‘Gosh, I want to tailgate with my family. I’m like, ‘Dude!’ I’m about to blow him off for the third time and it probably would have been the final time.
“He calls me and says, ‘Hey, I’m walking to the 50-yard line. Where are you?’ I say, ‘Perfect. I’ll meet you there.’ So I’m walking up, and I see this guy walking up to me and he’s in khaki pants and a polo and I’m like, this guy just told me he was on TV. I know he was not on TV. He’s lying to me. What is happening? This is a total waste of time.”
As he shook the man’s hand and the two of them start to make small talk about the game, Mac Lain noticed the man wasn’t writing anything down or taking any notes, like a normal reporter would in this type of setting. He wondered why he was having this conversation.
Who was this guy? And where was this going?
“Finally, after we kind of get going, he hits me with this, ‘So…’” Mac Lain said.
“He says, ‘So, there’s going to be a lot of new opportunities with ESPN. I’d love to fly you up to Bristol and see if you’d like to be on this team.”’
As Mac Lain began to understand that this man was referring to new opportunities with the ACC Network, his mind immediately went blank.
Advertisement
To this day, he still doesn’t remember what he said. But he does remember jumping at the opportunity to audition in Bristol.
The man, he would then learn, is named Patrick Donaher and is ESPN’s senior director of talent negotiatons.
“This is like, THE guy. The guy. The guy who found (Kirk) Herbstreit, the guy who found Maria Taylor. This is like THE guy,” Mac Lain said. “(Now), this (story) is hilarious. But it almost didn’t happen.”
As the two of them continued to chat, Mac Lain quipped he already knew Clemson was going to win the game — the Tigers did beat Alabama 44-16 — and joked the two of them should get out of California and just go straight to Bristol immediately.
When he finally met back up with Kaki and told her the news, tears streamed down her face.
“It was so awesome. I started crying because it’s so nice to see when people realize the hard work that somebody puts in,” she said. “For somebody to recognize that and it then lead to an opportunity like this, it was really cool to see that — to see how excited and happy he was about the opportunity.
“Of course I have a biased opinion, but just watching over the years, (broadcasting) just comes very naturally for him. I just kind of knew (he’d get the job.) I had that gut feeling that it was going to happen.”
By early February, Mac Lain was auditioning in Bristol.
Two weeks later, ESPN made him an offer.
“From the first day that I met him, he came to Bristol to audition and I sat and had lunch with him and I didn’t want lunch to end,” said Aaron Katzman, ACC Network’s coordinating producer.
“He’s a great storyteller, has a great back story, clearly is beloved by Clemson fans and he loves Clemson in return.
“He’s a home run hire for us. And I can’t wait for the rest of the country to get to know his name.”
(Melissa Rawlins / ESPN Images)Back at lunch, Mac Lain’s day is finally slowing down.
Advertisement
He has a radio interview with WCCP, the station that helped him get his initial start, at 2:05 p.m. and fittingly, it’s with Gramlich and Qualkinbush — a segment he does with his friends every Monday.
When the two hosts look at how far their friend has come, they aren’t surprised by where Mac Lain is. His time on the set includes pregame, halftime and postgame analysis of all 14 ACC teams.
It helps, of course, that he played for Clemson and therefore knows the Tigers like the back of his hand. He also went into the role with prior knowledge on some of Clemson’s ACC rivals.
But the biggest thing that has helped him?
His instincts.
“I think the more years I do radio and the more different people I do radio with, genuineness and authenticity really shine. You can tell there are people trying to be an analyst and you can tell there are people who are analysts. And he’s an analyst who is comfortable in his own skin,” Qualkinbush said.
“I also think he just loves college football,” Gramlich added. “He loves Clemson and the ACC and so he really loves the product he’s talking about.”
Kaki has watched as her husband studies film or researches teams and players on the computer when he’s not live on air.
“Definitely, it’s a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes to be able to talk intelligently about every team you’re supposed to be talking about,” she said.
And as for Swinney, Mac Lain’s former coach and now one of his interviewees, the Clemson coach has made time in his ever-busy schedule to enjoy the run Mac Lain is on, too.
“He’ll be awesome. He was born for that. He’s been preparing for that job his whole life and I’m just really proud of him,” Swinney said. “I’m getting older. Dang. I’ve got players on TV. That’s wild.”
(Top photo: Courtesy of Allen Kee / ESPN Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kGtpbm1ibnxzfJByZmlxX2d9cK%2FLnqSsp55is7C705uYpaRdmr%2Bqr4ymmJxlnJa2r3nAp5ilsaOpeqKvwmalnqynpL%2Bsew%3D%3D