ESPN officially announces ‘Bussin’ & Pate on Campus’

ESPN has officially expanded its partnership with two prominent independent creators.

The network announced that Bussin’ & Pate on Campus will air Fridays at 2 p.m. ET throughout the 2026-27 college football season, with the debut set for Sept. 4 in Baton Rouge ahead of Clemson-LSU on ESPN2, followed by a Sept. 11 stop in Ann Arbor for Oklahoma-Michigan on ESPN.

Officially, official 👏

‘Bussin’ & Pate on Campus’ will air Fridays at 2p ET on ESPN during the ’26-’27 college football season 🏈

📍 Sept. 4 | Baton Rouge, La. (Clemson-LSU) | ESPN2
📍 Sept. 11 | Ann Arbor, Mich. (Oklahoma-Michigan) | ESPN

More locations to come! pic.twitter.com/RSfzTeX3qD

— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) August 13, 2026

The show has been an open secret since Front Office Sports’ Ryan Glasspiegel first reported the concept in late July, detailing a Friday afternoon program built around Josh Pate and Bussin’ With The Boys co-hosts Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, broadcasting from campus sites that would sometimes, but not always, double as that week’s College GameDay location.

Glasspiegel noted that the show’s launch coincided with ESPN content president Burke Magnus expressing feelings that his network undercovers college football relative to the size of the television audience that games attract. By viewership, college football is the second-most-popular sport in the country behind only the NFL. The show also marks an expansion of ESPN’s partnership with both Pate and the Bussin‘ duo. Last year, Pate began making regular appearances on Get Up to talk college football. Compton and Lewan would similarly appear across ESPN’s daytime lineup throughout football season.

That expansion has been building steadily toward something bigger than guest appearances. And now so is this Friday afternoon show, which Pate insists isn’t meant to preview Saturday’s game so much as capture the mounting anticipation of the night before kickoff.

“The Friday is the build,” Pate said. “The Friday is the shaking up of the Saturday Coke bottle.”

With the program traveling to the site of College GameDay on occasion, the door is open for the network to fold the trio into its flagship pregame show down the line, if it decides that’s worth doing.