Josh Pate is still standing by the decision to put Donald Trump on his show.
Speaking at Barrett Media’s Audio Summit earlier this month, Pate traced the call back to a lesson from 2020, when he had just taken his job at 247Sports, and COVID-19 shut down live sports. He said the biggest misstep he watched other hosts make during that stretch was assuming their audience wanted political commentary mixed in with the games. Pate went the other way and said his show started scaling specifically because of it.
“I learned then, man, keep this stuff out of your commentary,” Pate said. “It does not matter who in your space criticizes you. It does not matter who in your space tries to tell you, ‘ No, no no, it is my position to tell you what your responsibility is with your platform.’ Ignore it. Listen to your audience. That’s the north star. That’s the lighthouse in the fog. And they’ve said unequivocally, ‘Don’t want it. We know where to go if we do want it.’ And your YouTube college football channel is not where we want to go.”
So when the White House called five years later, he said the decision took him about five minutes.
“The President of the United States called and wanted to do a college football show. I’m gonna do it, and it’s going to piss a lot of people off,” Pate said. “It may end up being a bad look. It may very well end up being that. But hindsight’s not a weapon. Instinct is your weapon, because no one actually ever makes a decision with the benefit of hindsight. Your critics are the only ones who have the benefit of hindsight.”
It’s the same argument he made back in February, when he defended the booking on X as an “auto-yes 1000% of the time,” writing that anyone expecting political discussion would be “sorely disappointed.”
What Pate didn’t anticipate was how short his window with Trump would actually be. He said the two spoke off the record before the cameras rolled, around the time the U.S. was on the verge of war with Iran, with Trump telling him the SCORE Act, the House bill setting federal rules for NIL and athlete compensation, had been on the back burner, and admitted he wasn’t as educated on it as he needed to be. Pate was left with a president who showed up to talk about a subject he hadn’t been briefed on, despite the White House having requested the interview in the first place.
“If I know I’ve got 10 minutes here, do I run the risk of asking a really in-depth question that he just goes eight minutes on an answer? You didn’t even have an interview at that point,” Pate said. “I am not like a classical interviewer. My interviews are with Ryan Day and Kalen DeBoer, not with Donald Trump normally. So it went the way it went.”
The interview showed it. Awful Announcing’s Sean Keeley noted that Trump spent much of the segment on an unrelated, incoherent tangent about NFL kickoff rules after Pate asked him about college football’s rules structure, then moved on to Herschel Walker’s Senate run and his own hiring philosophy before time ran out. Pate had already admitted on Barstool’s Macrodosing podcast that the 10-minute conversation “didn’t go the way that I thought it was going to go,” a fraction of the 35 to 40 minutes he says he’d been told to expect.
Asked whether he’d do it again, Pate pointed out that the question doesn’t really hold up. Making the same call twice still wouldn’t come with the benefit of knowing how it turns out.
“What I do know is I got really constructive feedback from the audience,” he said. “That’s what I listen to.”
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.