Kirk Herbstreit did not spend his early twenties dreaming about becoming one of the most recognizable voices in college football. After leaving Ohio State, he found work in Columbus radio and was “content” talking sports for a living. Then he sent ESPN a tape. That small decision changed almost everything. From then on, Herbstreit kept believing, and the doors kept opening.

“They said, ‘You should audition for this [GameDay]. You’re not going to get the job, but it’d be good for you this early in your career to go through that experience,'” Herbstreit said on the August 19 Wingmen podcast. “They brought me in. They brought Chris Fowler and Lee Corso, who are the guys on the show, into the auditions, and I was nervous as hell. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

“I prepared. I’ve watched guys on TV. There was just something that kind of clicked when the guys that were making decisions. They went from thinking, ‘This guy isn’t who we want to hire’ to ‘God, we’ve got to hire this guy.’ And so I was 26 years old, and I got hired to do College GameDay.”

Herbstreit graduated from Ohio State in 1993. He had been a QB for the Buckeyes and served as team captain during his senior season, but broadcasting was not some lifelong ambition he had carefully pursued at a platform like ESPN. He first joined the network as a sideline analyst in 1995. That meant his television career began before he had time to figure out what broadcasting was supposed to look like for him.

Get the Essentially CFB Newsletter. Rivalries, rankings, recruiting, coaching moves, and game action nationwide — your complete college football briefing.

As a result, Herbstreit had to learn on the job. His first ESPN role came with ESPN2, which was still a relatively new network at the time. He was not immediately sitting at the center of college football’s biggest pregame show. He was working the sidelines.

GameDay had launched in 1987. In less than a decade, Lee Corso had become one of its defining personalities. Chris Fowler had also established himself as the host. Herbstreit was the young former QB trying to break into a television world where he had very little experience.

However, what the former Buckeye had was the perspective of a recently retired player who understood the game from the inside. The chemistry of the panel clicked because the show combined Herbstreit’s youthfulness with Corso’s decades of coaching experience, personality, and unpredictability. Fowler provided the structure. The combination worked. And it is still working, even after Lee Corso retired, with Pat McAfee taking his place and Fowler moving to announcing duties.

Herbstreit is now ESPN’s lead college football game analyst. He has worked alongside Chris Fowler since the mid-1990s, calling playoff games and every national championship since 2014. That has won him five Sports Emmy Awards across studio and event coverage. ESPN’s own records now list him as the longest-tenured analyst on the program, with 30 years on the show.