This article was published in conjunction with the 2025 Awful Announcing Sports Podcast Power List. To read more about the sports podcast and digital video space and the people guiding it right now, click here.
Look around college football media right now and you’ll notice something: Every major color commentator has a podcast.
Greg McElroy has Always College Football, updating multiple times per week, year-round. Joel Klatt built his self-titled show to 250,000 subscribers. Kirk Herbstreit, one of the busiest people in sports media, finally launched Nonstop with Joey Galloway in September after years of resisting. Robert Griffin III’s Outta Pocket became enough of a property that Fox Sports made it an official part of his contract when he joined the network.
It’s not just the top-tier Saturday voices either. Chase Daniel co-hosts Scoop City with Dianna Russini. Aaron Murray co-hosts the Mac & Murray CFB Show with Eric Mac Lain. Tom Luginbill does Weekend Warriors with Anish Shroff. Sam Acho has his own self-titled show. Chris Simms, Devin Gardner, and Mike Golic Jr. all podcast regularly. The list keeps going.
The holdouts are easier to count. Neither does Jesse Palmer, Louis Riddick, Gary Danielson (soon to be Charles Davis), Todd Blackledge, or Dusty Dvoracek. But they could, and some of them used to. The infrastructure exists. The audience is there. The question isn’t whether they’ll eventually join the ecosystem — it’s when.
Podcasting has become a defining characteristic of the modern college football color commentator. The guys spending Saturday in the booth are spending the rest of the week in your earbuds, telling you how to think about what you just watched. They’re breaking down film, making award cases, ranking teams, and generally shaping the conversation around a sport that’s uniquely dependent on perception.
And that last part matters more in college football than anywhere else.
The NFL has 32 teams, a balanced schedule, and clear playoff parameters. College basketball has its issues, but Selection Sunday is choosing 68 teams with actual tournament résumés and metrics that matter. Even the NHL and NBA have objective standings that determine who makes the postseason.
College football? The Heisman Trophy is voted on by 870 media representatives nationwide, plus every former Heisman winner. The College Football Playoff Selection Committee consists of 13 members — a mix of athletic directors, former coaches, and administrators — whose job is to rank teams based on résumés that are impossible to compare directly.
Which means the voices in those voters’ ears matter more than they might in other sports.
And those voices are everywhere now. McElroy’s show has become one of ESPN’s signature college football properties. Klatt’s platform gives him a megaphone to push narratives about Big Ten superiority, reaching hundreds of thousands of subscribers (now on FS1 as well). RGIII’s podcast became part of Fox Sports’ value proposition.
That ubiquity comes with influence.
It’s worth noting that the CFP committee specifically excludes current media members from its makeup. But that doesn’t make media voices irrelevant to the broader conversation. The committee members aren’t operating in a vacuum. They’re watching the same games, consuming the same content, and hearing the same narratives as everyone else.
As one Nichole Auerbach, who participated in a mock CFP selection committee exercise, noted, “every committee member has different values,” with some relying on the eye test while others lean more on statistics. The eye test, that’s where sustained media narratives can matter.
When a prominent analyst spends multiple podcast episodes building the case for why a certain quarterback is the Heisman frontrunner, it shapes how voters think. When another analyst’s entire brand becomes tied to a particular conference’s strength, those narratives seep into the discourse. They become conventional wisdom.
These podcasts, like most in the genre, present themselves as more authentic than traditional media — more transparent, more willing to say what TV won’t let them say. And maybe they are. But they’re also businesses that need content, engagement, and growth. They need takes that travel. They need Monday morning storylines that keep people coming back.
College football has always had its kingmakers. The writers who controlled narratives. The TV personalities who shaped perceptions. But the podcast era has changed the scale of that dynamic. These aren’t weekly newspaper columns or five-minute TV hits anymore. These are multi-hour, weekly deep dives that allow analysts to build sustained campaigns for or against players, teams, and storylines.
And all of this is happening while the people who actually run college football are openly questioning whether the current system is sustainable.
As controversy has grown around the CFP selection process, with athletic directors, coaches, and commissioners openly questioning the committee’s decisions, discussions about objectivity versus subjectivity have intensified. Leaders of the Big Ten and SEC have explored changes to the selection process. Some have even floated the idea of returning to computer rankings.
That context makes the podcast boom among major CFB analysts worth scrutinizing. The people running the sport are grappling with questions about how much subjectivity is tenable in a system where outcomes can mean millions of dollars and fundamentally alter programs’ trajectories.
Meanwhile, the same voices calling games on Saturday are spending 40 hours a week building cases on podcasts for why certain players should win awards, why certain teams deserve playoff spots, and why certain conferences are stronger than others.
The podcast era isn’t going away. If anything, it’ll accelerate as more analysts recognize the platform’s value, both professionally and financially.
College football has always run on perception. The difference now is that the people calling games on Saturday are the same people controlling the narrative the other six days of the week. Whether that’s a problem depends on whether you think subjectivity in college football is a feature or a bug.
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.