Kirk Herbstreit took some heat over the weekend and his ESPN colleague isn’t happy about it.
Just days after Herbstreit - a college football analyst on ESPN’s “College GameDay” - clarified comments he made when he contended college football players don’t love football as much as they used to, Rece Davis - the host of the show - defended him.
“He went back and clarified it,” Davis said on “The ESPN College Football Podcast” on Monday, via SI. “He was talking about a segment of players who look solely at the ‘NFL or bust’ and everything else is a far second. There is nothing wrong with having that goal and it was a perspective, and he clarified it.
“The reaction I saw to it angered me. From a lot of our colleagues in the media, from some fans. And, look, you have to wear it. When you do what we do for a living, it’s incumbent on you to say exactly when you mean and inevitably, sometimes we aren’t going to be as precise, or in this particular case a little more broad than what we meant. But it was really unfortunate to me that people didn’t listen to the whole thing or chose not to listen to the whole thing when he went back and clarified because some of his points are completely valid and he went back and even said the phrase, ‘I’m not talking about all of them.’”
On Saturday, Herbstreit was talking about players who opt out of bowl games and why bowl games were meaningless to those who opt out to prepare for the NFL draft.
“Isn’t that what we do as football players, we compete? I don’t know if changing it, expanding it is going to change anything, I really don’t,” Herbstreit said. “I think this era of player just doesn’t love football.”
Later in the day, Herbstreit tried to clarify his comments on Twitter.
“Of course, some players love the game the same today as ever,” Herbstreit tweeted. “But some don’t. I’ll always love the players of this game and sorry if people thought I generalized or lumped them all into one category.”
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