For most college football fans, Saturday is the payoff. For Kirk Herbstreit, it is just another part of a week that barely gives him time to stop. Herbstreit explained how he handles the grind during an August 19 conversation on the Wingmen podcast, walking through what his week looks like when he has both College GameDay and a Saturday night game to call. He used the upcoming Ohio State-Texas clash as an example to take the fans through his schedule.
“I’ll leave Thursday night at midnight, get in there about 2 or 3 in the morning,” Herbstreit said. “I have a bus that travels around with me for college. So, I just go straight to that bus, go to bed, get up Friday. Friday is more prep, more time with the home team. In this case would be Texas. And it’s just prep, prep, prep…You’d rather be 100% locked in, and you feel so confident when you go on the air, and you just got to make time to do all that work.”
Herbstreit has been living some version of this schedule for years. He joined ESPN in 1995 as a college football sideline analyst for ESPN2 and became a College GameDay analyst in 1996. He has worked with ESPN since August 1996, making this a nearly 30-year relationship. But even with those years, Herbstreit has always maintained a relentless work ethic.
“Friday night, we’ll do a crew dinner with Coach Saban, Pat, that whole GameDay crew. And then, Saturday, I do GameDay,” Herbstreit said. “So, I got to fly somewhere else, and then I land and call that game, and then fly back to Nashville, get home about 2:00 in the morning. And then start all over again on Sunday. …I equate it to being on a treadmill at 10 miles an hour, [and] it’s like 10 till February.”
Herbstreit’s role at ESPN has grown a lot since he first joined College GameDay in 1996. He became ABC’s lead college football analyst in 2006 and has been part of the network’s biggest games ever since. When Chris Fowler moved into the Saturday night booth in 2014, the two reunited as a full-time game crew after nearly two decades together on GameDay.
ESPN has also kept finding more work for him. Fowler and Herbstreit called an NFL game together in 2020, and Herbstreit later moved into Amazon’s Thursday Night Football booth with Al Michaels in 2022. He has won five Sports Emmys and remains one of ESPN’s most decorated commentators. So when Herbstreit talks about the workload, there is plenty behind it.
And he has always talked about preparation as a major part of that job. In his 2021 book Out of the Pocket, Herbstreit wrote about his early GameDay years with Lee Corso and the amount of time they spent together traveling, filming and preparing for broadcasts. He also recalled Corso’s insistence on treating the job seriously, even when the television side looked effortless from the outside.