Who's the new guy?

Among Hank Williams Jr.'s all-star band of rowdy friends in the new "Monday Night Football" pre-kickoff music video is a guy who seems to have jumped out of the stands of an actual NFL game to grab a guitar and riff along with the likes of Charlie Daniels, Little Richard and Aerosmith's Joe Perry. You know, the one wearing Terrell Owens' Dallas Cowboys jersey.

The one player on stage who looks like he might actually be ready for some football. His name is Chris Burney and he plays guitar for a band called Bowling for Soup.

I hear you: Bowling for What?

The question, in the context of the other participants, is a fair one. Most of the other players have better-known bona fides. Much.

On bass, Bootsy Collins (James Brown, Parliament-Funkadelic).

Guitars are Perry, Rick Nielsen (Cheap Trick) and Little Steven Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and "The Sopranos," as Silvio Dante, overseer of the Bada Bing Club). Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic, Talking Heads) and Little Richard handle keyboards and high-pitched "Wooooo!"-ing, respectively. Clarence Clemons (also of the E Street Band) plays sax. The double drummers are Angela Webster (The Believers) and ?uestlove (The Roots).

Fronted, of course, by Hank Jr., who's been the "MNF" opening act since 1989.

The story of how Burney made the cut into this collection of rock royalty begins, as all great stories almost never begin, at a minor-league hockey rink in Hartford, Conn. Jed Drake, senior vice president and executive producer of ESPN, based in nearby Bristol, Conn., was in attendance with his pre-teen daughter on a night when Bowling for Soup was a value-added fan attraction. "They were playing behind the net while the teams were warming up," recalled Drake.

A dream gig.

But something about that rink-side performancerformance captured Drake's imagination.

A musician and music buff, Drake struck up a friendship with the band, who later recorded a special song -- "(Ready or Not) Omaha Nebraska" -- that serves as a theme song for ESPN's College World Series coverage.

Van Zandt actually assembled the band and recorded the music for the Williams video, but Drake got Burney on stage with Hank Jr. et al.

"Chris Burney was not somebody that came to the top of Little Steven's list," Drake said. "I guess because I'm executive producer, I have a bit of pull."

The decision to include Soup's guitarist wasn't entirely fanboy-fueled.

Burney and drummers Webster and ?uestlove are stage surrogates for potential viewers who know pro football best via John Madden's video games, and ESPN best for the network's shred-celebrating coverage of the X Games.

With a massive brand such as ESPN, nothing you see on screen -- aside, of course, from the live sporting events carried by the network -- is accidental or unplanned.

"In reality, there's a different generation of music fans who are into Bowling for Soup that may not necessarily connect to Little Richard or some of the other people," Drake said.

Bowling for Soup got a 2003 Grammy Award nomination for the song "Girl All the Bad Guys Want," and a little radio airplay for its 2005 single "1985," but is otherwise a super-sized cult act.

Wednesday, the band is scheduled to play the Kern County Fair in Bakersfield, Calif.

Friday, it's the Panhandle-South Plains Fair in Lubbock, Texas.

Full fanboy disclosure: The reason I know of or even care about Chris Burney is that an old friend sent me his band's 2004 album "A Hangover You Don't Deserve" -- great album title for a morning like this, no? -- early this year and it pretty much kept me from going completely Katrina-recovery nuts.

I'd describe the band's sound as the Ramones meets Sam Kinison meets blink-182 meets Steve Martin, but you'd do better to hear it for yourself. A preview of the first single from an upcoming new album can be sampled at www.bowlingforsoup.com. The song is called "High School Never Ends."

Calling before a round of golf during a recent break from the road, Burney said he first heard from Drake about doing the "MNF" shoot about six months ago. (Drake said he couldn't repeat for print the effusion of joy expressed in Burney's return e-mail upon getting the news.)

The video was filmed in June at Orlando's Hard Rock Café, and Burney, a self-described "hardcore Dallas Cowboys fan," said he was honored to be present, though, "I don't really think anybody had heard anything about us."

So comparatively little-known was Burney among his all-star band mates that a couple -- Perry and Nielsen -- evidently momentarily thought he was a roadie guitar-tech.

"When everybody was walking downstairs to get on the set, they were tuning their guitars by ear," Burney said. "I had an electric tuner with me and said, 'I've got a tuner over here.' Rick Nielsen handed me his guitar and I tuned it up.

"Then Nielsen said to Joe Perry, 'Oh, hey, guitar man's got a tuner over there.' "

And so guitar man Burney tuned Perry's guitar, too.

When the cameras rolled, Burney took his place on stage next to rock supernova Nielsen.

"I didn't know what to expect, but everybody was extremely nice," Burney said. "Everybody shared stories. A few people had some drinks and made a little party of it. That was fun. Everybody was extremely social. It was just a fun day.

"They had no idea how nervous I was sitting there holding the guitars and tuning them."