KBTX sports director Bruffett to retire after 37 years (2024)

Television viewers in 16 counties have relied on KBTX’s Darryl Bruffett for their sports fix for almost four decades. They’ve trusted the guy with a big smile who started every broadcast with “Howdy Brazos Valley.”

Bruffett in every broadcast would get viewers caught up on what’s happening at the high schools along with Texas A&M and Sam Houston. Bruffett said so long to his viewers Friday, but he didn’t say goodbye, because he’s not going anywhere. This is home. He’ll still do Classroom Champions, one of the station’s stables, along with a few other things.

“I still feel like I have some talents to offer,” the 60-year-old Bruffett said.

But Bruffett, a la Alabama football coach Nick Saban, wanted to cut back when he was at the top of his game.

“I just didn’t feel like I was as good as I needed to be,” he said. “I wanted to leave when people would say, ‘Oh, you could still do this.’ Not when I leave and they go, ‘You know, that guy should have probably left two months ago or two years ago.’”

Bruffett also felt it was time for the spotlight to be on Tyler Shaw, who has been with the station since 2019.

“He didn’t know it, but I looked at him and I said, ‘You know what?’” Bruffett said. “That’s the guy that’s going to replace me. And I wanted to make sure I left in enough time. I wanted to leave before he left.”

Bruffett knows the station’s viewers won’t be disappointed.

“I didn’t hire Tyler to replace me,” Bruffett said. “The station did, but I was hoping that he was going to be the guy who’s going to replace me because our thought process of covering local sports lines up identically and he is a great person.”

This pay period at KBTX runs through Saturday, which is Aug. 3. His first day at KBTX was Aug. 3, 1987.

“So, I kind of planned that out,” Bruffett said with a laugh.

He got in the business by chance.

When Bruffett started college, the game plan was to major in something he’d make money in, a lot of money. He was an engineering major with aspirations of being a chemical engineer until after a semester of taking math and science courses.

“I realized that wasn’t for Darryl,” Bruffett said.

Fate sent him into broadcasting as he was sitting in a counselor’s office at Alvin Community College, while watching a newscast on closed-circuit TV is done by students. The counselor told the inquisitive Bruffett it was a new program.

“So I said, you can learn to do that?” Bruffett said. “And they said yeah, and I said, ‘Sign me up.’ So it was just kind of a fly by the seat of your pants kind of thing.”

Bruffett after graduating from Sam Houston State, started his career as a weekend reporter at KHOU-TV under Matt Musil. He got a job at KBTX a year later as a part-time photographer and part-time sports reporter by Jeff Braun and he never left.

“A lot of people look at KBTX as a steppingstone,” Bruffett said. “But this is a great sports community. People love their high school athletics and the only thing they may love more than that is the Aggies.”

The state’s big cities have multiple professional teams as their main sporting attractions, but B-CS has something just as entertaining.

“We got the Aggies, the Aggies, the Aggies, the Aggies,” Bruffett said. “So, we have year-round sports. Plus, it is a great high school market. Not too big, and certainly not too small, and very talented. I just fell in love with it.”

The community’s personality seemed to be saying ‘Howdy’ the moment Bruffett arrived.

“It’s really weird that I’ve always been a howdy kid,” he said. “And I’ve always been kind of a country kid. I wasn’t born in the country, but I’ve kind of felt like I was a country kid.”

Aggieland surprisingly was an unknown for Bruffett.

“I didn’t know a whole lot about Texas A&M before I started working here,” he said. “When I went to Sam Houston, I knew there was a Texas A&M, I knew there was a University of Texas. I knew there was a University of Houston. But I mean, I didn’t know a whole lot about the traditions and all that kind of stuff. So when I got here, and everybody started saying, ‘Howdy, I thought, ‘man, I feel like I’m at home.’”

It became home because he fell in love with Lori Bruffett, the station’s current vice president & director of sales who started at KBTX in 1988 as a sales assistant. She became an account executive within a year and kept climbing.

“We met here in September of 1988 and I think we got engaged in the summer of ’89,” Bruffett said. “And she was from College Station. I knew that I needed to just kind of put [down] some roots, and she was way better at her job than I was. And I just kind of hung on.”

They initially didn’t want their co-workers to know they were dating, said Ron Crozier who was the sports director before Bruffett.

“They tried to keep it very secretive, very hush, hush and then it blew up out of nowhere,” Cozier said. They married in 1990.

Bruffett is hopeful viewers will remember him for being a man with integrity.

He broke his fair share of news stories, but he prided himself on accuracy.

“I always did a sportscast wanting to make sure that I was giving people accurate information, and I was trying to maybe entertain them, but it wasn’t about me,” Bruffett said.

Crozier said Bruffett is a perfectionist.

“Darryl wants to make sure of what he’s got before he goes on the air,” Crozier said. “Darryl wants to come across that way and he wants you to believe that, and he’s a very sincere individual.”

Perfection with sincerity is a tough combination, Crozier said.

“Because of his perfection, he’s trying to always think two, three or four four moves ahead of himself,” Crozier said. “And that bodes really well for someone who has been in a position as long as he has. You have to be that many steps ahead.”

On Thursday night’s show, the broadcast included a Southeastern Conference football preview on Tennessee.

“I think I said we’re going to talk about the SEC’s original UT, the Tennessee Volunteers,” he said. “Slide that in there and hope somebody remembers and thinks it’s clever and move on, don’t dwell on it.”

Hard work and a good heart are other things that’s made Bruffett who he is.

“A lot of times it’s rare with someone with his experience to still be heaving the camera around, but he really has a creative eye with the lens,” Shaw said. “He loved editing and shooting.”

Bruffett’s work habits showed Shaw the value of keeping file video, which was evident when they put together clips of Bruffett’s career.

Bruffett never rested on his laurels, Crozier said.

“He wants to look at what can he do?” Crozier said. “That’s always been his approach to operating a department.”

He created a great environment for young journalists who passed through. Greg Bailey is the current sports director at Houston’s KTRK. David Reed is the sports director at Sherman’s KXII and Chessa Bouche is a sports reporter at WVLA in Baton Rouge. Jake Kobersky is the TEA director of media relations. Retired Dwayne Parsons was sports director at KCEN. John Oakey is retired. John Wilson is Lorena ISD’s media service coordinator. Others included Casey Richardson, Cody Coil and current staff members Morgan Weaver and Nicole Griffith, along with Shaw.

“It’s been impressive to watch them move on and do other things in broadcasting or other ventures in life, knowing that at some point, they were following his lead,” said Crozier who is Twin City Missions’ director of media relations.

Shaw admired that Bruffett covered a Snook basketball game or Calvert’s 6-man football game with the same enthusiasm and work ethic he showed at an A&M football game.

“That is what drove him,” Shaw said. “Covering Texas A&M is the bread and butter, but he knew the importance of local [coverage]. That’s one of the biggest things that stuck out to me.”

Innovative Bruffett

Bruffett started doing Classroom Champions in 1995 at the urging of Jon Boaz, who was the sales manager at that time.

“They said can we do this?” Bruffett said. “I said, ‘Sure can, but I don’t have the staff to shoot it.’”

The sales team had someone in commercial production do the shoot.

“We wrote them and then they edited them and then we aired them,” Bruffett said. “It’s not really how we do a lot of stories, but because it was a commercial endeavor, we kind of did bits and pieces.”

Centerville’s Amy Gregory was the first Classroom Champion and in March of next year some lucky high schooler will be the 1,000th Classroom Champion.

“There’s bad news all the time,” Bruffett said. “There’s not always good news, but that was something that we kind of liked to hang our hat on. And it showcased a kid that not only was good athletically, but this [also] was a person that was also involved in their community, and they were good with their academics. And we just felt like we needed to shine a spotlight on those people.”

The station’s high school football fans also look forward to the Friday Night Football Fever Show. Former general manager Jim Baronet realized the station wasn’t maximizing its resources. It had tons of highlights from numerous football games they couldn’t squeeze into the Friday night broadcast.

“He said, ‘Can you do a 30-minute show on high school football after the newscast?’” Bruffett said.

It debuted in 1992 and was a success, but also created a huge headache. It was hard to produce the show considering the short turnaround time. They had to do the sportscast at 10:20 p.m. and 15 minutes later, Friday Night Football Fever aired.

The show took off when CBS hired David Letterman from NBC. His show aired from 10:35 until 11:35 p.m., giving the sports teams an extra hour to prepare.

“It was a very polished show,” said Bruffett, adding that Parsons added to the growth.

Taco Bell sponsored the show for about 25 years.

“At the end of the show, when we first started doing it, we’d bring in a table full of burritos and tacos, and we’d roll them out,” Bruffett said. “And you know, after we finished the show, it was a big taco feast.”

Bruffett had to pass on some postgame celebrations because he had to be at an A&M football game the next day.

“He’s just a great guy,” said A&M associate athletic director Alan Cannon. “What I don’t think a lot of people appreciate is the fact that he would be at a high school game, say at A&M Consolidated doing a Bengal Belle performance at halftime. He’s there. He then does the late Friday night show, but then he gets an hour sleep and he’s traveling to maybe an early A&M game on the road. To me, that just speaks to how much he cares not only about A&M, but the community and he’s just a great guy [and] great friend.”

Bruffett and his partner once traveled all night without sleep and got on the field at Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium just as the Aggie football team was coming out of the dressing room.

Bruffett and Wilson traveled to Alabama one year with Grady Chism, a former music director at Central Baptist Church and Christ United Methodist Church, who recently received his pilot’s license. They flew out of Bryan’s Coulter Field at 4 a.m., refueled in Jackson, Mississippi, and was picked up in Tuscaloosa by Chism’s brother, who was a security officer at Bryant-Denny Stadium. On the return trip, the four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza stopped to refuel again in Jackson, but couldn’t get the plane to restart.

“Grady said that sometimes happens and the battery has to be charged,” Bruffett said. “He said we can go get a car and some jumper cables and we’ll charge the battery, put the cowling back down and we’ll start it and go.”

The guy refueling the plane didn’t have any jumper cables, so they drove to a Walmart and bought jumper cables.

“They brought their Walmart jumper cables in that car onto the tarmac,” Bruffett said. “They charged the plane up, which took about 45 minutes. They put the cowling down. It started and we came home and live to tell the tale.”

Wilson had his doubts.

“John was scared,” Bruffett said. “But I told John, ‘Grady’s got as much skin in the game as we do, bud. If he’s willing to go, then we’ll go.”

The best & worst of Bruffett

Bruffett had viewers laughing when he performed with A&M Consolidated’s Bengal Belles dance/drill team at halftime for four straight years. He was keeping it in the family, since his wife had been a Bengal Belle.

Bruffett enjoyed a story he did with former A&M men’s basketball coach Shelby Metcalf on Lake Gig ‘Em, which is near Palestine. Bruffett’s daughter, Shelby, joined him on the trip.

“My daughter Shelby was not named after Coach Metcalf, but we enjoyed Shelby Metcalf and we loved his name,” Bruffett said. “And that’s how my daughter Shelby got Shelby.”

Darryl and Lori did give their sons sports-related names. Ryan was named after Alvin native great Nolan Ryan and Tyler Davis Bruffett begs for the nickname, TD Bruffett.

A challenging story for Bruffett was the pending firing of former A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher. Bruffett’s laptop died on the way home of the Mississippi State game. That’s not a big problem until he got a tip that Fisher was on his way out. Engineers were called in early the next day to get Bruffett’s laptop fixed.

“That was a tough moment, because you gotta have your equipment to be able to get stuff done,” Bruffett said.

Reporting on coaches getting fired was part of the business, but not one Bruffett enjoyed.

“I’ve struggled when coaches have gotten fired because they’ve become friends of mine,” Bruffett said. “[Volleyball coach] Laurie Corbelli, [baseball coach] Mark Johnson, R.C. and Shelby Metcalf. I think when all those people got fired, I think I cried. I didn’t cry on the air, but I mean, I cried because it hurt.”

He treasured heartwarming stories, which was the case with former head football coach R.C. Slocum.

“I loved the story I did on R.C. when he completed his cancer treatments back in 2021,” Bruffett said. “I love it, because I love R.C. and then I love it from the fact that he trusted me to tell a personal story of his.”

Surprising talents

When Bruffett wasn’t chasing stories, he was fixing problems that came up around the house, whether it was electrical or plumbing. He also can fix minor car problems.

“I’ve been told I’m very handy,” Bruffett said.

He’s pretty talented with a hammer and nails.

“I’ve built a chicken coop from scratch,” Bruffett said. “And I mean, I got backyard chickens now.”

Bruffett did some repair work for former KBTX employee Brenda Sims, who passed Bruffett’s number off to some of her friends. He’ll also do some odd jobs for the friends of his 89-year-old father who has been docent at the George H.W. Bush Library since 2008.

Boss’ favorite

If the sports department needed equipment fixed or had other issues, it didn’t hurt to be married to the boss, though it also was stormy at times, Bruffett said with a laugh.

“Lori knows that the sports department brings [in] a lot of money into this TV station, especially in the fall with all of our sports programming with Aggie Game Day and with Friday Football Fever and everything else that’s important,” Bruffett said. “So it’s beneficial there, but, gosh, she’s been awesome. I mean, she’s a great boss, not just to me. I think she’s a great boss to everybody that’s in this building.”

She recognizes her employees on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day on her own dime, Bruffett said. She values all employees, maybe the full-time ones, more than the part-timers.

“She did tell me today because I was complaining about something and she said, ‘Hey, once you become a part-time employee at KBTX, [there’s] no more bitchin',” Bruffett laughed.