Until I read your last sentence I was going to suggest IFTTT, but this will not fly for you.

If the TV audio is playing through SONOS, I think that a 3rd party player would be best for this application. I would not want the TV audio to stop, play the Browns toot, then continue the with TV audio. This seems clunky to me. With a 3rd party player the toot would be added to the overall experience, rather than interrupting the audio flow.

How would ESPN notify SONOS or the 3rd party box that the Browns scored?

I was thinking that there must be some way to use notifications from ESPN. Again…this is all a bit over my head. Lol

You may have seen this already …. and not sure it will help you …. but I thought I might as well post it having found it:

https://ifttt.com/explore/automations-for-sports

Thanks for sharing this - looks like the Twitter feeds they suggest in the link are dead. Also, don’t know how to program this.

To be honest, I think a geek like me could spend a lot of time on this and not produce a working solution. Your chances are probably rather less.

It might be a lot simpler and quicker to surprise him with a crate of beer.

I don’t think using an ESPN notification as the trigger to play the song is really going to work well in terms of timing.    Whether your watching a game through cable, satellite, or streaming, it’s going to be delayed several seconds.  Your notification isn’t instantaneous either.  The result is going to be that the fight song starts before you see the Browns score, or it happens many seconds after the score.  

Instead, I would look at using a smart button that you can press to easily and quickly play the song whenever it’s desired.  The ikea buttons  come to mind.  That’s going to take a bit of money and time, which I’m thinking is more effort than you want to put into it?

Of course, with Sonos, and pretty much any bluetooth speaker with  hard buttons, you can have the fight song in the queue and press play anytime you want.  A Roam would work well for this, as an example.

In terms of viewer experience the best approach would be to find a reliable score indicator and delay the video for the typical indicator delay. This would not be trivial and I’m not sure if a reliable indicator timing could be established.