A Gus Johnson broadcast may not be for everyone. The FOX play-by-play man received some criticism over the weekend when some fans perceived him to be openly rooting for Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffalos in the team’s 45-42 upset of TCU.
Kirk Herbstreit says he has been in a similar boat and what the average fan needs to understand is that what excites a broadcaster the most isn’t who is winning.
“First of all, you don’t want to do a 45 to 3 game. I’ve done plenty of those,” the ESPN analyst told Barrett Sports Media. “So if you’re if I’m guilty of anything, I’m kind of excited when the game’s competitive. If a team gets down by a couple of scores and then they come back and tie it? Selfishly speaking, I get excited.”
Herbstreit added that he had not seen or read any fierce criticism of Johnson. He could only speak for how he felt about the game, but it is easy to see why anyone calling Colorado and TCU would have been animated.
“If you have a game going back and forth like they had in that particular game, it’s easy to get caught up in the emotion of the game…It was like two or three plays, touchdown! Two or three plays, touchdown! How do you not get into that?”
Colorado got the bulk of the attention, not just from Johnson and FOX, but from the national media as well. Herbstreit says that has made it easy for some people to lose sight of how good of a game it actually was.
“It’s very easy to get caught up,” he said. “That’s why we all love college football, the emotion of it and the pageantry.”
