It's easy being famous

By: Gabe Gilson

If you were to watch any college football on a Saturday, possibly on ESPN, you would get the analysis of many people that know football. Of course, all the analysis is coming from former players and coaches that played and coached football.

It seems to me like no matter how good of a speaker, journalist, or analyst one may be, if you were once involved with a big time college football program your chance of getting face time Saturdays in the fall on ESPN is easy. Take Lou Holtz for example. Holtz is 71, deafer than a bat and about as easy to understand as Sloth from The Goonies. Whenever he does give an opinion, it is usually something insanely and annoyingly biased about team he used to coach, Notre Dame.

Holtz is not the only example of people hired on ESPN because they “know” football. Mark May, who used to play offensive line for the University of Pittsburgh, Lee Corso, who coached most notably at the University of Indiana and Desmond Howard who won the Heisman Trophy playing at the University of Michigan. All of these “experts” are not very good at providing the most essential information to the college football fan.

Not everybody on ESPN who comes from a football background is horrible at their job though. Kirk Herbstreit, who played quarterback at Ohio State University, does a great job providing excellent insight into the college football world. Maybe it was the excellent education he got but he always seems to have the right thing to say at the right moment.

If I wanted to be a college football analyst on ESPN, I think it would be very hard without doing a lot of coaching or making myself well known in the world of college football. It is really too bad that the only people who are hired these days are they big time football boys.