Donald Trump seemed to have no idea what Josh Pate was talking about regarding college football
After Josh Pate announced that President Donald Trump would appear on his show, the podcast host defended the decision, saying there would be no political discussions, only college football talk.
After listening to the interview, it’s not even clear if Trump was aware they were discussing college football.
From the jump in their 10-minute interview in the latest episode of Josh Pate’s College Football Show, Pate’s attempts to suss out authentic answers from the president about the sport kept hitting brick walls, only to be diverted to wherever Trump’s whims took him.
President Trump will join the show Sunday pic.twitter.com/ZC76YarHNK
— Josh Pate (@JoshPateCFB) February 19, 2026
Pate opened the interview with a softball question about the state of college football, leading the president towards his thoughts on “the structure of the game and what rules can you make, what rules can you enforce,” and how he feels “when you see that from your vantage point?”
“It’s too bad. I hate to see it,” starts Trump, before going off on a tangent about the NFL’s recent changes to kickoffs, which are unrelated to anything in college football.
Kudos to our Sam Neumann, who called that one last week.
1000000% chance there’s a 5-10 minute tangent about the NFL kickoff rules on a college football podcast. https://t.co/kHv5OVmWg3
— Sam Neumann (@Sam_Neumann_) February 20, 2026
Pate then asked Trump how he decides which college football games to attend.
“I’ll look around and say, well, South Carolina is good,” started Trump, referring to the 4-8 Gamecocks. “And Georgia’s good. I like Georgia. I like this Georgia team. I like your quarterback, by the way. I like Gunner [Stockton]. He’s going to be a great quarterback. I’m telling you, he’s already a great quarterback, but he’s only going to get better.”
Trump then turns to the assembled audience at Rome, Georgia’s staple, The Varsity, where the interview was taking place, to tell onlookers that Pate had asked him “how I judge players,” which Pate had not. Stockton, the player Trump had mentioned, was in the audience and had been making appearances with him over the weekend.
Trump then added that “I like certain people, players, and teams,” name-checking Nick Saban and Urban Meyer, neither of whom is an active college football coach.
Pate’s original question went unanswered.
Speaking of Saban and Meyer, Pate asked about Trump’s recent round of golf with that duo and what was discussed. Comically, Trump admitted that those conversations are “always” about politics after Meyer said on his podcast that their conversation was not about politics but college football.
Pate’s next question began by bringing up the Miami Hurricanes, then quickly transitioned to Curt Cignetti, who led Indiana to the national championship, before leaving all of that behind by asking Trump what he looks for when he hires someone.
The question allowed Trump to deliver one of his signature rambles about how great he is at hiring people and how great his current administration is. To his credit, Trump was the one who found a way to bring the conversation back to college football, though he did so in an incredibly comedic way: trying to get a cheap pop from Georgia fans about Herschel Walker, who was a disastrous candidate in his Trump-backed run for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
“I’ve had a good instinct for people. I think I’ve had a good instinct for athletes,” he said. “But Herschel’s a special guy. I think Herschel did really well. He tried really hard with his run, his Senate run. And I think he did really well. He got some, I think he got some unfair treatment, frankly. But I would say Herschel, maybe, was the greatest player ever in college football.”
From there, the conversation between Pate and Trump didn’t have much to do with college football. Questions offered passing glances towards coaches and strategy, but were really left for the President to answer about himself. Topics included the First Lady and her documentary, the Lincoln Bedroom, and Trump’s (apparant) ability to separate personal issues from business.
“He’s a good interviewer,” added Trump as they ended things.
Pate was correct in saying that “Those expecting political discussion will be sorely disappointed.” He was right in a sense, but perhaps not fully in intention. There was minimal political discussion, but there was almost just as little college football discussion. In the end, it was a collection of softballs that allowed Trump to do his patented dance of just saying whatever came to mind while peppering the discussion with casual political jabs and rewritten historical claims.
After the segment, Pate added that he had initially planned to speak with Trump for “30 or 40 minutes” and expected to dive deep into college football matters such as NIL. However, the schedule changed “really, really late,” meaning he’d only get 10-15 minutes. Pate also seemed to think that Trump was planning conversations about fixing college football in the near future, so better to let that happen first, which seemed like odd reasoning.
It’s a tidy explanation, but it still doesn’t explain why Pate spent most of the interview asking non-college football questions instead of peppering Trump with ones about the sport in general. Even his questions that had some college football aspect to them turned out not to be really about the sport.
Perhaps it’s true, as Pate said, that “when the President of the United States offers to discuss college football, it’s an auto-yes 1000% of the time.” As for where college football was in that discussion on a college football show, who knows? And what we were left with was, as Meadowlark Media’s Mike Ryan lamented, a normalization of Trump, at a time when you’d imagine more people would want to distance themselves from him.
