College football season is nearly here.
Forget last Saturday. It’s called Week 0 for a reason. Do you really want to believe the first game of the 2022 season was 3-9 Northwestern and 3-9 Nebraska playing halfway around the world?
Here at Barrett Sports Media, we are celebrating college football from a media angle. All week long, our editors and resident college football superfans, Arky Shea, Demetri Ravanos and Garrett Searight, will be looking at the best the media has to offer in terms of college football coverage.
The entire schedule is as follows:
MONDAY: Best Local Show
TUESDAY: Best National Radio Show
WEDNESDAY: Best College Football Podcast
THURSDAY: Best TV Show
FRIDAY: Best TV Play-by-Play Booth
The national college football conversation is all about the headliners. Who has the most unique way of saying “Alabama is good”? Who can deliver a take so well-thought-out and nuanced that you walk away convinced that Kirby Smart just may be on the hot seat?
College football, like Star Wars, happens across vast geography with storylines that are only loosely connected. If you can keep fanbases of multiple teams playing for wildly different stakes engaged with the same conversation, you are doing something right.
Here are our choices for the best nationally syndicated sports radio shows covering college football.
THE PAUL FINEBAUM SHOW by Arky Shea
You are allowed to say whatever you want about The Paul Finebaum Show but unless it’s a compliment, it’s going to fall on deaf ears with me. Finebaum is who introduced me to sports talk radio over twenty years ago and I absolutely see how he is still a powerhouse today. No one is more for the fans of college football than Paul Finebaum and his show. No one talks to more fans of college football than Paul Finebaum. The rapid pulse of the sport is measured in sound bytes recorded on his airwaves.
Finebaum has long been a very good interviewer that asks the most important questions a wandering mind might fancy. He’s also a very funny, self-deprecating host. His flare is for taking the listeners on a ride with the callers being the driver. He allows for the caller, the college football fan, to scream all of their most passionate battle cries without judgment while maneuvering them alongside callers of their rivals, all in attempt to show that this sport, college football, is NOTHING without its fans. It’s genius radio and a doorway for those unaware of the constant hustle, that is daily, to be a fan of a team in the South.
THE DA SHOW by Garrett Searight
In a radio world hyper-polarized by roughly 4 teams per league — outside of the NFL — The DA Show bucks all the trends. Damon Amendolara doesn’t subscribe to the theory that you should only talk about the Lakers, Warriors, Nets, and Celtics, just like he doesn’t believe college football talk should only be about Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, and USC.
Many will say you shouldn’t have an interview with Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson or Tennessee’s Josh Huepel. “Nobody is talking about them. They’re not relevant nationally,” is the argument frequently given. Well, they’re not relevant nationally because nobody is talking about them. So DA talks about college football as a whole, not just the power players, and interviews more coaches than anyone. If you’re a college football fan, not just a fan of a team or a conference, The DA Show is a must-listen during the football season.
THE HERD by Demetri Ravanos
Colin Cowherd talks to big names and he asks unique questions. What more do you want from a national sports radio show when it covers college football? He gives opinions that are interesting, maybe not always right, but interesting. Isn’t that valuable in a sport where being right has meant picking Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia or Clemson every week of every year?
Colin may not talk about everything in the world of college football, but it is so clear that he likes the sport a lot. And I really like that in a time when everyone is bemoaning so much change, he is asking people to justify and explain their bitching. He is the one national voice that genuinely likes college football that isn’t constantly telling me that the sport is about to go down the toilet.
What about Nick Kostos on BetQL?