For 17 seasons, Bob McElligott was the voice Columbus hockey listeners heard on the radio, and the Blue Jackets ended that run with a single line about a contract. He had thought he would spend his life calling baseball. What he did instead, once the club moved on, involved no station and no network.
What happened to Bob McElligott?
Bob McElligott runs Clear Breakaway, a hockey podcast and YouTube platform he built himself after the Blue Jackets declined to renew his contract. He launched it in the autumn of 2026 with Adam Dell, a former television digital producer who handles production and the social channels, and it is funded by listeners through Patreon rather than an employer.
| Bob McElligott: then and now | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Seventeen seasons as the radio voice of the Columbus Blue Jackets |
| Role before | Radio color commentator from 2009, then radio play-by-play announcer |
| Earlier | Announcer for the Syracuse Crunch and the Syracuse SkyChiefs, ten seasons |
| From | Pennsylvania |
| Current role | Host and owner of Clear Breakaway, as of November 2026 |
| Format | A twice-weekly show with Aaron Portzline of The Athletic, plus postgame and solo shows |
| Where | clearbreakaway.com, YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify |
| Funded by | Listener subscriptions through Patreon |
Why did the Blue Jackets let Bob McElligott go?
Because the club merged its radio and television broadcasts into one feed. Columbus became the fifth NHL club to drop separate radio and television crews, after Buffalo, Carolina, Dallas and St. Louis, and the single simulcast crew is Steve Mears and Jody Shelley, both employed by the team. Dylan Tyrer stayed on as the studio host.
The club gave no reason beyond the contract. Marc Gregory, the Blue Jackets’ vice-president of business intelligence and broadcasting, said McElligott had made significant contributions on air and in the community over 17 years, and that his voice had been at the heart of many of the club’s unforgettable moments.
McElligott has said the timing was the hard part. He was told over the summer, and by then there were no openings left with other teams.
READ MORE: How to watch the Columbus Blue Jackets
Clear Breakaway publishes twice a week with Aaron Portzline
The core show is a conversation between McElligott and Aaron Portzline, who covers the Blue Jackets for The Athletic, and it goes out twice a week, with a live version on YouTube on Wednesday evenings. Around it sit postgame reaction shows, listener mailbags and a second strand on which McElligott talks about other sports.
The postgame shows turned out to be the popular part, which he has described as a therapist role for a fan base after a loss. That is the thing he says he has always valued about Columbus: the interaction with the people listening. On his own platform there are, in his words, no chains.
Bob McElligott’s 17 years in the Blue Jackets radio booth
He arrived in 2009 as the radio color commentator and moved into the play-by-play chair for the 2013-14 season, taking over from George Matthews, the club’s original radio voice since it entered the league. He also fronted the radio pregame and postgame shows alongside Ryan Mitchell.
| Year | Role | Employer |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 to 2009 | Announcer, ten seasons, for both the hockey and the baseball club | Syracuse Crunch and Syracuse SkyChiefs |
| 2009 | Radio color commentator | Columbus Blue Jackets |
| 2013-14 | Radio play-by-play announcer, succeeding George Matthews | Columbus Blue Jackets |
| Alongside | Host of the radio pregame and postgame shows with Ryan Mitchell | Columbus Blue Jackets |
| 2026 | Host and owner | Clear Breakaway |
Across the two cities, he spent twenty-seven seasons describing games before he owned a microphone of his own. Ten in Syracuse, seventeen in Columbus, and the seventeen were all with the same club.
Ten seasons as the voice of the Crunch and the SkyChiefs
Before Columbus, he was Bobby Mac in Syracuse, and he called two sports for two clubs in the same city: the Crunch in the American Hockey League and the SkyChiefs in minor league baseball. He told a Syracuse station that the decade there gave him lessons he still uses every day.
Among the things he saw from the baseball booth was Roy Halladay pitching for the SkyChiefs before the major leagues took him.
The sport he expected to spend his life on was not hockey
It was baseball. He has said plainly that he thought he was going to be a Major League Baseball man and that this is what he got into the business for. Hockey, in his telling, found him, and he discovered he liked it a great deal.
That is the thread worth noticing in what he does now. The new platform carries a second show about other sports alongside the hockey, which is closer to the job the Pennsylvania teenager was aiming at than seventeen years on one club’s radio feed ever was. Our guide to how to watch NHL hockey covers where every club’s broadcasts live.
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