It has been a busy few months for Kirk Herbstreit with his new role as the analyst on Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime in addition to being on College GameDay and being the lead analyst for college football on ESPN/ABC. It has led to a lot of travel and not a lot of sleep most weeks. However, one addition to College Gameday this year has provided Herbstreit with an extra boost.
Herbstreit was a guest on Pardon My Take this week and he mentioned that the timing couldn’t have been better for Pat McAfee to join College GameDay this season.
“The timing for me personally could not have come at a better time than having Pat McAfee join the show this year. His energy for me personally on the show and even more importantly off the show was huge for me this year as far as kind of keeping my juice going when you are sleeping 2 hours a night or flying wherever you are flying. You know how he has that infectious personality and energy. That was a big win for me this year personally.”
For some who are not normal viewers of college football, Herbstreit was a new voice for people watching the NFL. With that being said, Herbstreit did not feel that he had any growing pains this year and he felt comfortable from the very first game that him and Al Michaels did between the Chiefs and Chargers.
“We started with Mahomes vs. Herbert. I felt like Al and I hit the ground running. Probably the craziest thing when we were done with that game was I think people that communicated with me were like ‘You guys sound like you have been working together for 10-15 years’ just because it was a good game number one and there was comfort there.
“I didn’t feel like there were growing pains for me personally. Maybe the audience had growing pains…I do think that’s very apparent to me.”
When Herbstreit would go to a bigger city to do a TNF football game, he could feel that the audience was not yet used to hearing his voice on an NFL game.
“You get it in New York and a lot of the bigger cities where it’s just NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB. They look at college football the way we might look at middle school football, not even high school football. Until the draft comes around, they don’t know anything about it. I don’t know how people live not watching both personally. I don’t know how my life would exist if I didn’t watch both. I can’t imagine having a black hole towards the NFL. There are people that do that.”
Herbstreit will wrap up his busy schedule when he is on the call along with Chris Fowler for the CFP National Championship Game between TCU and Georgia on Monday (7:30 PM ET, ESPN). Holly Rowe and Molly McGrath will be on the sidelines for the game.
