Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard uttered complete nonsense on TV to open 2022
Welp, that didn’t take long.
It’s been a strained college football bowl season, as Covid-19 issues caused games to be canceled or adjusted at the last-minute. Meanwhile, players hoping to get a jump start on preparing for the NFL continue to opt out. And the semifinal games of the College Football Playoff were once again a dud.
So what we really absolutely did not need, at all, was a couple of former players given air time to spout ridiculous takes about the current generation of football players.
Alas, that’s what too often passes for “analysis” on the television networks that, after all, stand most to benefit from a bowl season that involves the best players and attracts an audience.
So, here’s Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard waking up on the wrong side of history and carrying water for ESPN and the bowl industrial complex to start a new year:
Herbstreit begins by decrying the idea that the non-playoff bowl games have become “meaningless” to the players who decide not to partake because they prefer to avoid future injury risk and to use their time to prepare for the events leading up to the NFL Draft instead.
Times change, Kirk. Begrudging kids who simply want to have the best shot at getting a good start on their pro career is a bad look. Pretending they’re disloyal for failing to ball out in some bowl game that doesn’t even have a real name — they’re all just sponsorship opportunities anymore — is really gross.
But he goes on: “I think this era of player just” PREGNANT PAUSE “doesn’t love football.”
Just stop, man. These players are opting out precisely because they love football so much that they want to make a career out of it. And it’s not like they’re leaving their teams high and dry: There are 85 scholarship players on a Division I team. Plenty of kids who love football and haven’t had a chance to prove themselves are waiting in the wings to take the playing time of those who opt out.
Howard, wearing some snazzy ear muffs, has a chance to steer the conversation somewhere else but he fails completely.
“When we were coming up, Herbstreit and myself, to go to a bowl game was a huge reward for a fantastic season. That’s what it meant. It’s like, ‘Ok your team played this well so you’re going to be rewarded by going to this bowl game, you’re going to get a ring, you’re going to get swag.’ Now, kids don’t really care about that. They have a sense of entitlement and it’s like, if we’re not going to the one that matters, then it just doesn’t have as much value to them as it did us growing up.”
What Desmond sees as “a sense of entitlement” is actually, of course, just today’s players being smarter about where they fit into the whole business of college football. They’re less likely to have a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome because the entire discussion around the corrupt system of college sports has changed. There’s more money than ever flowing almost exclusively to the coaches and administrators, and players are openly fighting for more rights.
What’s most tragic about all of this is that Herbstreit and Howard are well positioned to be having real conversations about this. They could easily sit down with the players making these decisions and genuinely try to understand the situation. They could, as Jason Kirk pointed out on Twitter, be a part of finding solutions to make this time of year work in a way that is advantageous for all involved.
Instead they opt to throw out cheap buzzwords they know will get a reaction.
The power dynamics in college sports are just beginning to change, thanks to name, image, likeness deals and a continued push to make sure the players are getting their fair share of the profits. Herbstreit and Howard are understandably sentimental about how it used to be, but if they can’t catch up to how the sport is evolving they aren’t the best people to discuss it going forward.