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Fast-rising college football personality Josh Pate lives in an interesting dichotomy where he receives endless hate for his opinions on social media, but when he travels to campuses, he is besieged by requests for handshakes and pictures.
At Front Office Sports’s Tuned In sports media summit in New York City last week, Pate appeared on a panel with NBC Sports personality John Fanta and talked about when he first observed the acute difference between internet hate and the real world.
“I learned this traveling around with [Danny] Kanell—very, very hateable. Kanell’s opinions are just terrible sometimes!” Pate said lightheartedly. “Now, he’s a good buddy of mine, but I would see people trash him all the time. This was back when I still lived in the world where I thought the internet was a real place. The internet’s not a real place. We would go on these campuses, and I would see all these people come up to him and shake his hand. ‘Danny, I love you!’ ‘Danny, can I take a picture?’ And after a few times I was like, ‘Where’s all the hate?’”
Pate continued, “And I realized, it’s right there [holding up phone], it’s not real life! It can be useful, but it’s not real life.”
Fanta took the attitude that the online haters come with the territory of an otherwise privileged career.
“You’re gonna have some people that just don’t like you for whatever your take, whatever your opinion is,” he said. “We’re all doing a different job. We get to do it. Those people, they can exist, but that’s life—that’s how it goes.”
Elsewhere in the panel, Pate and Fanta both lambasted the idea of expanding the College Football Playoff to 24 teams from 12.
“We’re going to call it an expanded playoff,” Pate said. “Really, what it is is it’s an ATM to bail out very bad decision-making from, and I use this term loosely, leadership in college football.”
This season will be the third and presumably final year of the 12-team Playoff, after it expanded from four teams in 2024.
“The effort’s going to be there, the pageantry, the theater of it’s going to be there,” Fanta said. “I get all those things, and I love that about college football. I think college football is really fun, but we have barely given 12 teams time and runway. The moment that it goes to 12, we say 24. When it goes to 24, are we going to try to go to 30?”
