ESPN will be starting up a new college football program this season that will feature analyst Josh Pate along with Bussin’ With The Boys co-hosts Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, according to a report on Thursday by Front Office Sports.
The show will air each Friday afternoon, according to the report, and it’ll take place from chosen college campuses. There will be weeks when the Friday show airs from that Saturday’s site of College GameDay. The time of the new show wasn’t known yet, according to the Front Office Sports report.
An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment on the reported new show.
Pate was a regular presence in ESPN’s college football coverage last season, appearing on ESPN’s Get Up throughout the 2025 campaign. Front Office Sports had reported previously that ESPN wanted to expand Pate’s role during the 2026 college football season. Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of content, felt that college football wasn’t covered enough along the network’s talk-related programming despite the high ratings that the actual games get.
ESPN will reportedly now be featuring Pate more after he already hosts his own multiplatform digital show that has partnerships with Yahoo Sports and On3. Pate’s show has more than 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Pate’s path is similar to that of Pat McAfee, the former NFL player who hosts his own talk show on ESPN.
“You look at Pat, namely, and you look at what a trailblazing few years this has been. What a game-changing few years this has been,” Pate told Front Office Sports. “And then you look at yourself and say, ‘All right, well, I’ve got an opportunity now.’ Like, what a shame if I drop the ball with my little portion in my little lane over here because there could be 50 people down the road that maybe benefit from what we do, carrying the college football flag on a network like ESPN.”
With this reported new feature show on ESPN airing this fall, the places that the show broadcasts from are going to have teams fighting for the national championship. Here is what the Kalshi market is currently saying about which of those teams have the best shot to be holding the hardware in January:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
