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Kirk Herbstreit is pulling triple duty for loaded Week 1 schedule
By Andrew Olson
Published:
College football fans are used to seeing a lot of Kirk Herbstreit as a host of College GameDay and a color commentator on ESPN/ABC’s primetime game of the week. For Week 1 of the 2017 season, however, they’ll be seeing even more Herbstreit than usual.
ESPN has Herbstreit scheduled for three games during Week 1: Indiana-Ohio State on Aug. 30 (Thursday), Florida State-Alabama (Saturday) and Tennessee-Georgia Tech (Monday). As if that’s not enough, Herbstreit wants to see his son’s high school game in Nashville on Friday and will be hosting GameDay from Atlanta Saturday morning.
Awful Announcing asked Herbstreit how he can possibly prepare for three games in five days. His biggest worry is his voice.
“The adrenaline allows me to physically be OK and mentally to be sharp,” Herbstreit said. “But my voice is the one thing that gets challenged when you do this much TV at one time.”
Luckily for Herbstreit, being Week 1, he has extra time to prepare for these six teams. Don’t expect to see him pull triple duty plus GameDay during the middle of the season.
“If I did three games in the middle of the year, (preparing for so many teams) might come into play,” he said. “But when you have basically the entire month of time to prepare yourself, then there’s still plenty of time to get what you need and be as prepared as I would be if I were just calling one game.”
And if the bosses in Bristol want to add to his schedule for Week 1, he’s game.
“They could ask me to do four,” Herbstreit said. “If I could physically make it around to do the four, I would do it.”
Andrew writes about sports to fund his love of live music and collection of concert posters. He strongly endorses the Hall of Fame campaigns of Fred Taylor and Andruw Jones.
