The 2023-24 college basketball season has been a season of adjustment for Josh Pastner, but he’s fully embracing what’s in front of him.
Pastner, the former head coach at Georgia Tech, is serving as a studio analyst for NBC’s Big Ten coverage on Peacock and works for ESPN and CBS Sports Network as a game analyst.
He told the Arizona Daily Star that after he was relieved of his duties at the end of last season at Georgia Tech, he found working in television as the right move for a gap year.
“I wanted to take a year and really kind of recenter, and I was excited about trying to do television,” Pastner said. “I reached out to people on my own. Some networks had seen me do things before and were interested. But it also gave me the chance to be around my kids as much as I can. Because when I was the head coach for a long time, I was gone a lot of times and I was trying to win games.”
Josh Pastner remains based in Atlanta and travels from there up to Stamford, Connecticut for his Peacock obligations and then to do his other TV work. He said it’s been nice to not have to wear the coaching cap for a little bit. Television has presented a new and exciting challenge.
“I’ve liked it a lot. I’ve been able to see things from a different perspective,” he said. “Obviously I’m keeping notes from my time as a head coach, things that I thought I did well, things I think that I need to do better at, things that I want to continue to study.”
The approach to being an analyst, Pastner said, is much different than how involved he would be as a coach.
“You’re not making the strategic decision on what to do that’s going to affect the outcome of the game or say ‘Hey, we want to run these three plays today against this defense, we’re switching or something, whatever,'” he said. “So it’s different.”
While he’s had fun and enjoys having much more free time and much less stress, he admitted that working in TV hasn’t been a super smooth transition. Josh Pastner still has the coaching itch, and it sounds like Pastner would love to get another coaching job for 2024-25 and beyond. But he’s not going to completely rule out staying in TV another year if need be.
“It’s not easy being in television, I can tell you all the work it takes behind the scenes, with the host and the producers,” he said. “But you’re kind of responsible for yourself. You’re not responsible for basically a whole organization and, and so it’s a different level of stress in a sense but it’s still you got to be prepared.”
“Is there a career in it for me? It’d be really cool but that would be for the bosses of the different networks to determine,” Pastner added. “Same thing about coaching — that’s going to be based on athletic directors and presidents. Once we get to March, if opportunities open up, there will be a clearer picture.”
