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College football analyst and personality Josh Pate is amid his inaugural season hosting a weekly traveling ESPN college football show, Bussin’ and Pate on Campus, alongside Bussin’ With the Boys cohosts Will Compton and Taylor Lewan.
The show is more than just the next step for Pate’s relationship with ESPN after he appeared regularly on multiple network shows last season. It’s a sign of the network’s major investment into college football programming, outside game-day broadcasts.
It all started with lunch in Atlanta on the eve of last year’s SEC Conference Championship Game with Pate, ESPN president of content Burke Magnus, and a few other executives. At the time, Pate was a regular contributor to multiple ESPN morning shows, like Get Up and First Take, in addition to his YouTube college football show. But he didn’t have his own independent content with ESPN—at least not yet.
“[Magnus] was really inquisitive, which kind of surprised me. He really wanted to know, ‘what do you think? What do you think about college football?,’” Pate told Ryan Glasspiegel at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit on Tuesday. “Just dealing with high-level media executives, that hasn’t been my experience. My experience has normally been, index finger in your face, so to speak.”
Pate joked that he asked Magnus if he had “permission to speak freely,” which Magnus granted.
“My opinion had been for a while, dating back years and years and years, that just the overall legacy media system had underserved college football,” Pate told Glasspiegel. “From a broadcasting of game perspective, it’s immaculate, it looks incredible. But from the Sunday through Friday perspective, I’m looking at 37 different NBA shows on networks and there’s really not one college football studio show post-Rece Davis, Mark May, Lou Holtz College Football Live era that’s speaking to me. I’m having to go elsewhere for it.”
This belief, Pate said, was the “impetus” for the college football show he created. “Even all these years later, with all the nine- and ten-figures invested in media rights, I thought it was still underserved,” he said. “So I shared that. And [Magnus] said, ‘Well, we may do something about that.’
“And that’s where the germ of the idea of the Friday show we do was born. I was just blessed to be at the right place at the right time.”
Magnus, as well as other ESPN executives, began to see Pate as a potential personality to fill the college football void at the network, FOS reported in January. The show was officially announced ahead of the 2026 season—less than a year after that fateful lunch in Atlanta.
