Rod Gilmore

Rodney "Rod" Gilmore is an American real estate lawyer and college football analyst for ESPN. He works with Joe Tessitore on the network's Friday and Saturday night telecasts. Prior to joining ESPN in 1996, Gilmore worked for Prime Time Sports, SportsChannel Bay Area, and Pacific Sports Network. He is a 1982 graduate of Stanford University, where he played football for three years, and received his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. He was part of the Stanford team that was involved in The Play, a legendary last-second kickoff return by the University of California Golden Bears to defeat Stanford in The Big Game on November 20, 1982. Gilmore speaks fluent German, and once interviewed a German football player in German during an ESPN college football broadcast.

In addition to calling college football games, Gilmore is also a practicing attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area. His father, Carter Gilmore, was the first African-American elected to the Oakland, California city council; and his wife, Marie Gilmore, was elected as the mayor of Alameda, California in November 2010.

On the June 18, 2013 edition of College Football, Gilmore did not properly research a quote from Arden Key, a class of 2015 Gamecock verbal commitment. Gilmore noted that Key said one had to "try to fail" at the University of SC. While a true quote, it was only a small portion of his entire statement, in which he went on to state that "I liked the academic center. The academic center makes you want to study." Gimore took the recruits soundbite out of context. Gilmore went so far as to lambast the attitudes of student athletes and wrongly accused them of blowing off a quality education while pursuing an NFL dream.