Brad Nessler apologized for dropping the phone in the middle of the interview. Van Brocklin, one of three cats he and his wife Nancy have in their Duluth, Georgia, home, had jumped onto Nessler’s desk and startled him.

Yes, Van Brocklin. As in Norm Van Brocklin, the Hall of Fame football player. The Nessler family has a tradition of naming their cats after Hall of Famers — there have been a Butkus, a Nitschke, an Elway and a Lambert, among others. So it was fitting that Van Brocklin, whose namesake was also the Vikings’ first coach, interrupted his owner while discussing Minnesota football.

Nessler, the main play-by-play announcer for CBS on its Big Ten football broadcasts, was born in St. Charles, Minnesota, about 25 miles east of Rochester. He will be back in his home state on Saturday to watch the Gophers vs. to call fourth-ranked Penn State at Huntington Bank Stadium. It will be Nessler’s first home game since the 29-26 loss to Michigan on October 31, 2015 on ESPN.

Nessler is looking forward to his return to Minnesota, “especially after everyone has been texting me all day about the snow on their deck,” he joked Wednesday. Nessler has reunited with analyst Gary Danielson, his old ABC/ESPN affiliate from the 1990s, for CBS’ first year in the 18-team Big Ten. “This will be our first taste of Big Ten football in November,” he said, pointing to Saturday’s forecast of temperatures in the 30s.

Nessler’s roots in Minnesota run deep: from St. Charles to what was then Mankato State College and to the Vikings as their radio voice in 1988 and ’89. “When I got the job with the Vikings, my dad broke buttons on his shirt, he was so proud,” Nessler said.

From the age of 11 or 12, Nessler wanted to be a sportscaster, and he remembers the early days of calling high school games in the Mankato area, when he was his own “producer, engineer, spotter and statsman.” I had to try to climb a telephone pole to connect a phone line,” he said. “This is crazy, and I’m making $50 on a Friday night when I should be courting my future wife.”

His early influences included a who’s who of Minnesota-based talent in the field: Ray Christensen, Ray Scott, Herb Carneal and Halsey Hall. His first major network role came in 1990, when he worked for CBS on NFL, college football and college basketball games.

Nessler is known for his work on SEC games for CBS, and the move to the Big Ten was a homecoming of sorts. He has renewed friendships from more than 30 years ago, when ABC/ESPN had the Big Ten rights.