From 2000-2020, Mike Golic was a part of plenty of sports fans’ morning routines when he was on ESPN2 or ESPN Radio. Golic has done plenty of things since he and ESPN parted ways in 2020, but he almost went back to doing morning sports TV somewhere else.
Golic was a guest on The Dave Pasch Podcast this week and while he wouldn’t reveal specifics about which network offered him a return to morning sports TV, he did say he does enjoy sleeping in now in the mornings.
“I almost got back into morning TV. That was an iffy thing if I wanted to get up that early again.
“I would have had to move. It wasn’t radio at all. It was a morning sports TV show. It just didn’t work out. It was all amicable and everything. The toughest part about it in talking to my wife, she was like geez, you would be able to get up at 4:15 again? I’m almost 60, it wouldn’t have been for 20 years this time around. I’ve kind of gotten used to sleeping in till 7:30, 8:00, so that early wake-up call would have been interesting.”
Meanwhile, Golic mentioned over the last year or so, he has tried plenty of different media ventures, such as calling NFL games for Westwood One, college football games for Learfield, doing a podcast on DraftKings — Golic & Smetty — and doing guest appearances on Meadowlark Media with Dan Le Batard and StuGotz. One idea that was pitched to him was having his own podcast company.
“Somebody approached me about starting my own podcast company and I thought man, do I really want to go down that road? If I was 10-15 years younger, maybe I would. I hemmed and hawed with that.”
Pasch and Golic were on the call for college football games in 2020 on ESPN. Pasch was doing the play-by-play from his house while Golic was at the studios in Bristol. During that time, Golic’s biggest fear was that Pasch’s Wi-Fi would go out, but he thought the duo did a great job of making the audience feel like they were at the game when they weren’t.
“My biggest takeaway was the fear that your Wi-Fi would go out, which I think it did one time for a short time and I would be left alone to do play-by-play and color. That was the biggest fear I had. You were in your house, I was at least at the studios in Bristol. I had tons of monitors, I had everything I needed outside of being there.
“You doing it from your house and all the negative possibilities that could happen when you are trying to run a national TV broadcast from your house. That was pretty wild. It was crazy that we worked the whole season together and the first time we saw each other was my last game at ESPN (Fiesta Bowl). It was still a lot of fun. Our job was to call it like we were there and I think we did a pretty good job of that.”
Could this have been GMF?(Good Morning Football)
Not a bad guess. I was thinking it could have been Carton’s show on FS1.