2025 Hall of Fame Feature: Matt Lepay

Before Evan Cohen became a multi-media fixture on ESPN, before Dave Pasch became a radio play-by-play voice for college sports and the NFL, before Jason Benetti became the voice of Major League Baseball with the Detroit Tigers, they all shared a common touchstone.

Matt Lepay not only served as a mentor to the trio, he did so without hesitation, fanfare, ego or pretense. In the process, Lepay put down a professional foundation that led to him being the first media member to be enshrined in the special services category of the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame.

“He was just really nice to me,” said Pasch, who was born in Madison, interned with Lepay for a summer in the early 1990s, attended Syracuse and currently is the voice for the Arizona Cardinals. “A lot of times, the people you’re interning for really don’t want to help you. Maybe sometimes people see competition. But Matt could not have been more friendly, more giving and helpful. He was such a pro. Great voice. Great energy. I’ve always felt that he’s one of the best radio play-by-play guys in the country.”

Benetti grew up in Chicago and became enamored with all things Lepay and his role as Voice of the Badgers while attending Syracuse and, later, Wake Forest.

“You could ask my college roommates, probably the guy I listened to the most because I just thought his cadence and his word choice and his pacing and the passion he threw at it, I wanted to be Matt Lepay when I grew up,” said Benetti. “I just think Matt Lepay is one of the best play-by-play announcers in the entire country. I think he’s impeccable, always.

“I love the sound of his voice and I love that he has become so much of a staple. I ask him all the time, ‘When’s the statue going up?’”

Lepay would scoff at any talk that puts him in the vicinity of a spotlight so bright, but he’ll be the first to acknowledge how fortunate he is to have the job he has.

“I’m humbled beyond words,” he said of his pending enshrinement. “I think of hundreds of other people – players, coaches, administrators, people who believed in me and trusted me to be fair – but it’s never lost on me that the program started to really build in the time where I was the lucky one to be the broadcaster for them. I can never not consider that. If (the Badgers) were still struggling, it might be a different story.

“It’s the effort and success of so many others and I was the lucky one to describe that. It’s put me in a position like this. I’m very proud of it to be sure, but I’m very humbled by it because I’ve never had anything remotely to do with the success of what’s happened. I’ve just been the lucky one to have a great seat to describe it.”

Lepay came to Madison in 1988 after graduating from Ohio State and soon was anointed the radio voice of UW men’s basketball. He subsequently added Badgers football to his repertoire in 1994. He’s held down both roles ever since – he estimates he’s done more than 1,500 games combined – sharing his capable, unique, enthusiastic insights for generations of UW fans.

Lepay was behind the mic for so many iconic moments in Wisconsin history that it seems almost impossible to give each one their due.

He saw three men’s basketball teams advance to the NCAA Final Four (2000, ’14, ’15).

He called back-to-back Rose Bowl victories (1999, 2000) and three consecutive Big Ten Conference football championships (2010, ’11, ’12).

He celebrated a Heisman Trophy for Ron Dayne, a Naismith Award for fellow inductee Frank Kaminsky and now joins Barry Alvarez, Dick Bennett and Bo Ryan, as well as 23 contemporary football greats and 12 one-time men’s basketball stars, in the UW Athletic Hall of Fame.

If you have a favorite bolt of vocal lightning from The Voice, it’s probably somewhere between his electrifying “Four! Oh! Eight!” call of Melvin Gordon’s 408-yard rushing effort vs. Nebraska in 2014 and Freddie Owens’ three-pointer with 1 second left vs. Tulsa to cap an unprecedented comeback as the Badgers advanced to the Sweet 16 in 2003.  

“I know Matt loves Wisconsin,” Pasch said. “He could have been doing national stuff. He could have been doing NFL. He could have done NBA. He probably could have done whatever he wanted.

“I know Matt loves Madison and he loves the Badgers. It’s a great testament that the grass isn’t always greener. If you love your job and love what you do, you love the people you work for and love where you live, there’s nothing wrong with being in that job as long as you want.

“I think Wisconsin fans should feel blessed and fortunate that they’ve had a chance to listen to Matt for as long as they have because he’s one of the best.”

Does Lepay have a singular gift. Well, sort of. 

“He’s one of the nicest people on the planet,” Benetti said. “He’s always in to have a conversation.”

Benetti said Lepay has a unique way of merging everything he does to the highest level.

“Guys like that, they make you feel like you’re at the game, playing the game or both,” Benetti said. “Boy, his tone and his fever and his explosiveness always mirror the play. He’s just got this way of punctuating these plays.

“He’s also a technical genius. Usually in play-by-play, you’re either very technically sound or you have a lot of personality. Matt has both. Matt has this way of punctuating a play that I immediately I hear it and go, ‘That’s Matt.’ It feels right always. He just never misses with the emotion of the moment.”

Yet there was a game when Lepay almost took a powder and Cohen, a UW graduate, almost had to fill in. 

“To this day, the biggest honor of my career came from Matt Lepay and it’s something that never actually happened,” Cohen said.

It was March of 2002. Cohen made the trip to Washington, D.C. with the gang from WSUM, the campus student radio station in Madison, to call an NCAA tournament game pitting UW against St. John’s. After the Badgers prevailed, they drew eventual NCAA champion Maryland. Cohen, who served as an intern for Lepay and Mike Lucas, was up early.

“The morning of the second-round game, Matt says to me in a raspy voice, ‘If I can’t go tonight, you have to do play-by-play,’ Cohen recounted. Lepay said: “You and Mike are going to do the game together.”

“At this point, I’m starting to freak out,” Cohen said. “What are you talking about?”

Lepay: “My voice is shot. Mike and I talked about it. I cleared it with Learfield and I cleared it with everyone at the station.”

Cohen: “I don’t know if I’m capable of doing this. Why didn’t you tell me last night? I could have prepped.”

Lepay: “I knew if I told you last night that you’d prepare all night and you wouldn’t be ready for the game today and I need you to be ready for the game.”

Cohen: “The game rolls around, Matt’s able to do it. I never actually did the game. To that day, that’s the biggest honor of my career. I had no experience and no resume and he was the one doing the hiring. To this day it means the world to me.

“I don’t want to come off as a wimp in all of this, but I was probably thankful that he was able to go because I probably didn’t think I was ready and I didn’t want to let him down.”

Cohen, who’s worked for Good Karma Broadcasting for the last 22 years, got emotional a couple of times describing Lepay’s impact on his life.

“I’ve been so lucky to have him every step of my career in every move I’ve ever made, asking ‘What do you think about this? What do you think about that?’ I would be doing this and I would be doing that.”

Pasch, who calls college football, men’s basketball and NBA games for ESPN in addition to his work with the Cardinals, had a similar experience.

“When I interned for him, there was no pretense,” he said of Lepay. “There was no ‘Hey, kid, this is how we do things.’ He was positive. He was encouraging. He was friendly. He was humble. He was great. I love his whole vibe and how he handled himself.

“When it comes to description, pace, energy, passion, he’s as good as there is to me as far as radio play-by-play.”

Benetti, who also calls college football and men’s basketball games as well as select MLB contests for FOX Sports, went so far as to invoke one of the all-time prolific rock-and-roll artists.

“He’s a little bit like Billy Joel or someone like that who’s played ‘Piano Man’ a thousand times,” Benetti said of his friend and mentor, “but if you’re listening to it for the first time it feels like he’s playing it for the first time for you.”

BEST OF THREE

One: Lepay said Bennett, who coached the Badgers from 1995 to 2000 and was inducted in the UW Athletic Hall of Fame in 2012, left a lasting impression on him. “He was kind of like, ‘Here I am, warts and all,’” Lepay said. “We just had conversations about things where he would openly admit where he could have done something a little bit better or where he felt like he needed to apologize for being tough on a player the day before. He just showed his vulnerabilities more than most.” Former UW player and assistant coach Howard Moore, whose wife and daughter died in a tragic car accident in May of 2019 and left him with serious health issues, also had a strong impression on Lepay. “You get to meet a lot of pretty special people in this kind of position and this place has a lot of special people,” Lepay said.

Two: Lepay shared the key to calling a quality college football game with Cohen. “I go into every Saturday thinking that the audience knows who the quarterback is, who the running back is and who the wide receivers are,” he said. “My job is to tell them the story about everyone else when applicable.”

Three: Lepay always enjoyed the banter he had with Bob Uecker, the famously funny and beloved play-by-play man for the Milwaukee Brewers who died in January at the age of 90. Their last meeting was in June in the radio booth at American Family Field. “I was in awe of him and he just kind of made me feel nice and relaxed very quickly,” Lepay said. “It was a good conversation that we had, good memories that I’ll take with me forever.”