Brandon Walker and Kayce Smith closed the book on Unnecessary Roughness this week, ending Barstool Sports’ longest-running college football podcast so Walker can launch a solo show under the same banner.
The Brandon Walker College Football Show debuts Aug. 3 on the same YouTube channel and social accounts that housed Unnecessary Roughness, per Walker’s announcement. The show will run Monday through Thursday before shifting to three days a week once the season starts, and will include guest interviews, listener phone calls, and voicemails, with Liam Blutman staying on in some capacity.
More Brandon Walker CFB Show news
Will start Aug. 3
On sane YouTube/social media as @UnnecRoughness
Interviews and guests
Phone calls and voicemails
Blutman is involved
Monday-Thursdays in August. Three times a week in season pic.twitter.com/PwPqEOn8ID— Brandon Walker (@BFW) July 15, 2026
“This is the very last Unnecessary Roughness,” Walker said on the finale alongside Smith, who co-hosted the show with him for nearly seven years. “I did not, I am not doing the Brandon Walker College Football Show because I’m tired of doing it with Kayce Smith, or I don’t like Kayce Smith, or I was ready to get away from Kayce Smith. I love Kayce Smith.”
A major announcement from @BFW and @KayceSmith pic.twitter.com/doMgCIn3IV
— Unnecessary Roughness (@UnnecRoughness) July 15, 2026
Smith will direct her attention toward Barstool’s other football properties, including the Barstool College Football Show, which she co-hosts with Walker, Dave Portnoy, and Dan “Big Cat” Katz, and which has folded into Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff as a recurring segment since Barstool’s wide-ranging partnership with the network began last summer. She also revealed that she’ll be spending considerably more time in Tampa with Jon Gruden this season on top of an already expanding workload since Barstool’s deal with Fox, with a fuller announcement on that still to come.
“If you can end it on your own terms, then that’s what you should do,” Smith said. “Because a lot of times it runs it into the dirt, and we’re not running it into the dirt.”
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.