(L-R) Dennis Dodd, Jane Gordon, Greg Henry and Tom Shatel at graduation, May 10, 1980.

By Austin Fitzgerald

Dennis Dodd, BJ ’80, who has covered college and professional sports at CBS Sports for decades, announced his retirement today.

Dodd’s remarkably consistent career has seen him cover sports for more than 40 years, and he has crested a number of professional peaks in that time. Working for the likes of The Kansas City Star and sports-centered newspaper The National after graduating from the Missouri School of Journalism, he ultimately found himself at the leading edge of the industry when, in 1998, he began writing for a pioneering effort in digital sports news: CBS SportsLine.

He stayed with CBS Sports for the rest of his career, covering everything from March Madness to the Stanley Cup Playoffs and earning acclaim along the way — including from the Football Writers Association of America, for which he served as president in 2006.

That career began at the Missouri School of Journalism, where — unlike the majority of students interested in covering sports — he was on the sports beat from the beginning, covering athletics at the local Hickman High School.

But while he acknowledges his luck in landing the coveted beat from the get-go, he didn’t miss the humbling lesson that all students at the School of Journalism learn at one time or another: To go big, you have to start small.

“A lot of people come out of school wanting to cover the Yankees,” Dodd said. “I’m proud to have covered high schools. I learned from the ground up about persevering and hitting deadlines.”

Of course, starting small doesn’t preclude dreaming big. Dodd grew up with the voice of Harry Caray, who not only spent decades as a sportscaster and announcer for the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs but also served as the eccentric voice of Mizzou football for several years. In idolizing Caray, Dodd found connections to the institutions that would become the foundation of his career.

“I loved Caray on football, and I subsequently fell in love with football because of the way he did it,” Dodd said. “I said, ‘I want to do that.’ So I went to Missouri.”

At the School of Journalism and early in his professional career, he became enamored with the power of relationships when it comes to telling stories that matter, particularly when those stories involve college athletes. He recalls initially struggling to gain access when covering Austin College for his first employer out of school, the Sherman Democrat (now the Herald Democrat) in Sherman, Texas.

“The football coach was Larry Kramer, and I couldn’t believe I had to go through him to interview players,” Dodd said. “I even called my old sports editor at the Missourian, because my thought was, ‘Coaches don’t tell us what to do!’ But he told me that was the way it worked — you really have to work at it to develop relationships, and that’s something that still appeals to me.”

That emphasis on relationships has guided him to quite a few highlights in his career, including spending five days in Iowa City as women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark’s time in college came to an end. Then there was an award-winning story in 2001 about a memorial to legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, who died in a plane crash in 1931. During Dodd’s reporting for that story, he befriended Easter Heathman, the unofficial caretaker of Rockne’s legacy after he witnessed the plane crash as a young man. That relationship led to Dodd writing another memorable piece as a follow-up story, this one 20 years later in 2021, examining Rockne’s impact on a small Kansas town.

But amongst these many relationships, there is one that stretches all the way back to the beginning, to the thrilling voice of Harry Caray and the poetry of the games Caray brought to life for audiences: the love of Mizzou football. And as a consummate storyteller, he traces that relationship back to one night: a Mizzou vs. Iowa State game in the 1970s.

“I sat on the rock ‘M’ and watched a punt returned for a touchdown,” Dodd said. “Unfortunately, it was called back for a penalty. But you know what they say: You never forget your first kiss. Well, that was my first kiss — of college football. I was hooked.”

Updated: March 13, 2025