We’ve been watching Kirk Herbstreit try to have it both ways on the Ted Cruz booking for a week now, and it took his own Twitter account to settle the argument. On September 18, Herbstreit told cameras he doesn’t know the first thing about Cruz’s politics. That same day, someone found the tweets proving otherwise, and Herbstreit was the one who wrote them.
The booking itself wasn’t new controversy. Cruz showed up on College GameDay in Austin on September 12 to talk up the Protect College Sports Act, and Texas-Ohio State fans spent ten straight minutes booing him off the set, chanting his name like he’d just cost them a cover bet. That part of the story is finished. What happened six days later is the part worth sitting with.
This isn’t the first time a broadcaster’s “I just call it down the middle” defense has run into an inconvenient paper trail, and it won’t be the last. (The excuse works fine until someone checks the account, which in 2026 takes about as long as it takes to type a name into a search bar.) Herbstreit picked the neutrality lane. Neutrality lanes require you to have never said anything worth quoting back, and it turns out Herbstreit has said plenty.
What Did Kirk Herbstreit Actually Say About Ted Cruz?
Herbstreit told cameras on September 18 that he’s “an independent guy, right down the middle of the fairway,” and that he doesn’t “know anything about his political views.” He said GameDay wasn’t “picking sides in any way at all,” just chasing chaos and reeling it back in, per NBC Sports.
It’s a tidy answer, delivered with the practiced calm of a guy who’s spent two decades not getting dragged into fights on live television. (Herbstreit built that reputation on purpose. It’s why ESPN trusts him with the biggest chair on the biggest show in the sport.) The trouble is what he specifically chose to deny: not disagreement with the booking, not a claim about which way GameDay leans politically, but any awareness at all that Cruz has views worth having an opinion on.
That distinction is the whole ballgame. A host can defend booking a guest he privately disagrees with and still call the segment fair. A host cannot credibly claim he has no opinion on a politician he’s watched give interviews for a decade, not when that exact claim is the entire foundation for calling the booking neutral in the first place.
So What Do Herbstreit’s Old Tweets Actually Show?
Hours after that interview aired, Front Office Sports contributor David Covucci resurfaced two Herbstreit tweets from 2016: “Just don’t like the vibe of Cruz. Too much BS,” followed by a question about whether it’s “possible for Ted Cruz to talk REAL,” since he sounded like “he’s practiced each line 20 times.”
Covucci pulled the tweets straight from the archive and posted them:
https://twitter.com/DavidCovucci/status/2101042664820945036
Ten years is a long time to forget having an opinion that specific. (I’ve forgotten what I posted last month, but I also wasn’t publicly denying my own political awareness on national television twenty minutes earlier.) “Too much BS” isn’t neutral language. It’s a guy watching Cruz do interviews and forming a take, which is the exact thing he swore, on camera, he’d never done.
I used to compile research notes for television analysts before a couple of them were household names, and the rule everyone learned fast was simple: don’t say anything on air you can’t defend once it’s screenshotted. Herbstreit broke that rule for about ninety seconds, and two tweets from a decade ago are going to outlive the interview by a wide margin.
Roland Martin wasn’t shy about naming what that was:
https://twitter.com/rolandsmartin/status/2101040078340456660
He wasn’t alone in it, either. Dan Wolken called the defense “completely disingenuous” and, more bluntly, “as full of [expletive] as any human being has ever been in a 90-second clip.” Jason McIntyre kept his reaction shorter: “Oh brother… this is a tough 90 seconds right here.” None of the three needed Covucci’s screenshots to smell something off. The tweets just made it provable.
Why Did ESPN Book Cruz on GameDay in the First Place?
ESPN doesn’t put a sitting senator in the pregame chair for no reason. Disney and ESPN have been pushing lawmakers on the Protect College Sports Act for months, and Cruz co-authored the bill. Putting him on GameDay gave the network’s own legislative priority a friendly platform disguised as pregame programming.
College GameDay has spent years building a reputation as the one pregame show where the only stakes are campus rivalries and playoff seeding. Handing a senator the microphone to promote a specific piece of legislation, on that same set, in the same season Congress is actively fighting over that legislation, tests that reputation in a way ESPN clearly didn’t think through before the cameras rolled.
The bill didn’t need the assist, for what it’s worth. It cleared the Senate on a 74-24 procedural vote this month, with Cruz co-authoring alongside Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell. That’s a bipartisan margin serious enough to stand on its own without a Saturday morning cable hit, which makes the booking look less like a necessary favor and more like an unnecessary one.
Forgetting a decade-old tweet is a normal thing to do, and nobody should be held to perfect recall of their own timeline. But Herbstreit didn’t say he’d forgotten an old opinion. He said he never had one, and that’s the specific claim two screenshots kill on contact.
There’s a version of this story where none of it matters beyond one bad news cycle for one broadcaster. But GameDay is the platform ESPN uses to signal what college football takes seriously every Saturday morning, and the show just spent a week defending why a legislative fight belonged on a set built for point spreads and pregame picks. That’s a bigger problem than one flimsy answer to one reporter’s question.
I think the neutrality defense was always the weak point, because “I don’t know anything about his politics” is one of the easiest claims in television to disprove. Herbstreit could have said he disagreed with booking a sitting senator at all and left it there. He could have said politics has no place on a football show and declined to comment on Cruz’s views one way or the other. Instead he picked the one defense with a paper trail, and Martin, Wolken and McIntyre spent September 18 reading it out loud.
Herbstreit isn’t losing the GameDay chair over this, and ESPN clearly isn’t worried about the blowback costing him anything. What’s worth watching is whether the network books another senator before the Protect College Sports Act clears its next vote. If it does, “not picking sides” is going to need a better story than this one.
