ESPN to Launch CFB Show With Josh Pate, ‘BWTB’ Hosts

ESPN is planning a new college football show with Josh Pate and Bussin’ With The Boys cohosts Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, sources told Front Office Sports.

The show will air on Friday afternoons and take place from college campuses, sometimes (but not always) from the site of College GameDay, sources said. It was not immediately known what the time slot for the program would be. An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment.

Last year, Pate made regular appearances on ESPN’s Get Up throughout the football season. FOS previously reported that ESPN was looking to expand his role this upcoming football season, as the network’s president of content, Burke Magnus, has felt that college football has been under-covered on ESPN talk programming relative to the high ratings the games garner. 

Pate hosts his own multiplatform digital show, with partnerships with On3 and Yahoo Sports, and has more than 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. He recently joined FOS editor-in-chief Dan Roberts for a conversation that included general NCAA topics, following the Pat McAfee path at ESPN, and his reaction to the backlash he faced for interviewing President Donald Trump.

“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 FOS. “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.”

The Bussin’ cohosts also started appearing on ESPN studio programming last year, after their popular podcast migrated from Barstool Sports to a presenting sponsorship with FanDuel. The duo also recently launched a show in partnership with NASCAR.

“We have more independence going solo,” Compton told FOS of the decision to leave Barstool last year. “We get to think about it more as growing the brand, growing the business versus just pouring into a singular podcast. And FanDuel just really gave us that access, the opportunities … I have nothing but good things to say about Barstool. But again, it was one of those bittersweet things to where we were just ready to kind of spread our wings and bet on ourselves in kind of like a different area inside of the industry.”