Kirk Herbstreit has a schedule that would break most people.
He works Thursday Night Football for Amazon, hosts College GameDay on Saturday mornings, and calls the biggest college football game of the week on Saturday afternoon or night for ESPN. It’s a grind that has him crisscrossing the country every week, and it’s taking a toll in ways that are becoming harder to ignore.
During an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show on Tuesday, Herbstreit was asked how often he wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn’t know what city he’s in.
“It happens quite often,” Herbstreit said. “I think the hardest thing is… if you said, ‘Where were you last week?’ that’s the hardest thing to know. Because when you do this, you know, it just stacks. Days and weeks stack on top of each other, so you kind of get lost on where you’ve been. I know where I am right now, and I know where I’m going this week. I know that. But other than that, I don’t know a whole lot.”
The admission came just a few days after he left College GameDay in Eugene, Oregon, on a motorcycle to catch a private jet to Dallas for the Red River Rivalry. That was Saturday. Sunday brought Thursday Night Football prep. Monday brought the Dan Patrick interview. This week brings Steelers-Bengals in Cincinnati on Thursday, then College GameDay in Athens for Georgia-Ole Miss on Saturday, which he and Chris Fowler will undoubtedly call that night.
According to ESPN, Herbstreit traveled more than 5,400 miles for his various football responsibilities last week alone.
But not everyone is impressed with the sheer spectacle of it all. This week, The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand called out the travel segments on his Marchand Sports Media Podcast, questioning whether ESPN was making the show about Herbstreit instead of college football.
“Nobody cares about any sports personalities’ travel, especially when they’re going private,” Marchand said. “On Saturday, Herbstreit is in Oregon, then has the private jet to get him to the Texas-Oklahoma game. They travel him out there. He leaves the show early. Then they have him on the private jet, trying to do it. It’s locking up. Every time he talks, it’s like when you talk to somebody on a cell phone. ‘Can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ That’s not good TV.”
Marchand might be right that the choppy, mid-air updates are “not good TV,” but they’re also an honest, if unflattering, snapshot of what Herbstreit described to Dan Patrick. ESPN can dress it up all it wants, but the reality is that Herbstreit might wake up in Athens at 3 a.m. on Saturday and not know what city he’s in.
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.