2014By Matt Yoder on

ESPN’s top college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit took to Twitter early Monday morning for a brief, but rare outburst.  Herbie spoke out against fans calling him an Ohio State “homer” for putting the Buckeyes in his personal final four.  Of course, Ohio State eventually made the playoff and Herbstreit’s projections matched the selections of the committee.  But that apparently didn’t stop people from questioning his motives.  The backlash was enough for Herbstreit to take this public stand:

Why did Herbstreit have to take that kind of stand on Twitter defending his integrity?  Because his mentions were full of things like this:

https://twitter.com/angie_welch/status/542011892890222593

If that’s not enough, then there’s this fantasticly absurd piece of writing from Culture Map Houston that lambastes Herbstreit as a “Buckeye honk” in a piece that would fit very well under the umbrella of “vast right wing conspiracy.”

Herbstreit has been one of ESPN’s lead college football analysts for some time and his career at Ohio State and appreciation for the institution has never been a secret.  But it’s also never clouded his judgment as an analyst.  In fact, quite the opposite is true.  Herbie has always gone the extra mile in making sure he’s fair and impartial as an analyst.  In fact, so much so that he’s often criticized by the OSU fanbase for being a “Fake Buckeye.”

Yea, fringe Ohio State fans have been hating on Herbstreit for years for some misguided belief that he betrayed the honor of THE Ohio State University.  Don’t believe me…

As ridiculous as that seems, it gets worse.  Just how bad was the fringe element of the Ohio State fanbase for Kirk Herbstreit?  Just how overwhelming was the scrutiny and pressure?  Herbie picked up his family and moved to Tennessee to get away from it all.  That’s right.  He had to move away from Columbus because the small minority of very vocal and totally crazy Ohio State fans couldn’t understand that he had to be objective in his television analysis and stash away the scarlet and gray.  This is what he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2011:

“Nobody loves Ohio State more than me,” said Herbstreit, a former Buckeyes quarterback. “I still have a picture of Woody Hayes and my dad (Jim, a former OSU player) in my office, and nobody will do more than I do for the university behind the scenes. But I’ve got a job to do, and I’m going to continue to be fair and objective. To continue to have to defend myself and my family in regards to my love and devotion to Ohio State is unfair.”

“From a sports perspective, this is rough,” he said. “I love Ohio State. Love the Blue Jackets. Love the Reds. Those are my hobbies. I don’t like moving. I love living here. I don’t want to leave. But I just can’t do this anymore. I really can’t keep going like this.

“Eighty to ninety percent of the Ohio State fans are great. It’s the vocal minority that make it rough. They probably represent only 5 to 10 percent of the fan base, but they are relentless.”

So in the space of three years we’re to believe that Kirk Herbstreit went from being so disloyal to Ohio State that he had to move out of the state completely… to being a massive homer?  I don’t think so.

This, in a nutshell, is the messed up world of college football.

Kirk Herbstreit is not Mark May.  But maybe that’s where the underlying issue really is here.  If you’ll allow a brief tangent, perhaps the old adage is true that it only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch.

May is a king-sized troll.  His preposterous and well-known personal vendettas are abundantly clear, and yet ESPN trots him out with Lou Holtz every week and masquerades him as someone who is supposed to be an impartial and objective college football analyst.  May very clearly fails in that regard.  Truthfully, May’s continued propping up should represent poorly on ESPN’s brand and their college football coverage as a whole.  And because of his agendas, perhaps the seeds are planted in the minds of viewers that other analysts must have agendas too.  ESPN probably doesn’t help the cause by employing analysts who literally wrote the book on “My Conference Can Beat Your Conference.”  Perhaps those seeds contributed to the ESPN-SEC bias storyline that was so prevalent this year.

That’s a real shame though for the hard-working analysts that do their job the right way.  And at the top of that list is Kirk Herbstreit.  No right-thinking person could look at Herbstreit’s body of work and well over a decade of evidence and come to the conclusion that he’s been anything but fair and objective.  Questioning his motives and integrity, especially with regards to putting Ohio State in his personal Final Four when he agreed with the committee, is well out of bounds.

Perhaps Herbstreit can take some solace from this – if both sides are calling him out for being too much of a homer and too much of a Fake Buckeye, he’s probably doing his job just right.

About Matt Yoder

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