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What’s the value of college football media days in 2026?
Credit: Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images
By the end of next month, every college football team in America will have played at least one game. Until then, fans are still in the thick of what Steve Spurrier once called “talking season.” Until Week 0 arrives, all we have are predictions and hypotheticals.
We have arrived at something of an oasis in this desert, though. Throughout July, writers and broadcasters gather at arenas and hotel ballrooms for media days, where they can hear directly from the players and coaches at the center of their speculation since the transfer portal opened in January.
Each conference’s media days are held within its geographic footprint. The Big 12 hosted its event outside of Dallas, the ACC was in Charlotte, the Big Ten was in Chicago, and SEC Media Days, the proverbial grandaddy of these events, were in Tampa.
When the practice began, it seemed like a no-brainer. If you covered a college football team, you needed to go to media days. It was the only way to get up close and personal with other teams in the conference. You went to media days to better understand what your team’s opponents were heading into the new season.
In the age of conference networks and something like SEC Media Days becoming a programming event for ESPN, I will admit that I thought being there in person had lost some of its appeal. If there are peaks and valleys to these things, though, the valleys have not been deep. It may not necessarily be fewer outlets; it may be fewer people from those outlets who attend.
No one’s relationship with conference media days has changed quite like Paul Finebaum’s. He has gone from being just another reporter at the SEC event in downtown Birmingham, AL in 1985 to being the guy that adds perspective and commentary for ESPN to all of the news in 2026.
“ It was like a small family dinner, and it quickly grew until it essentially became a World Cup final,” he told me. “There was really no way 41 years ago to predict that. For the first few years, you could still grab a coach or players without a presidential secret service detail around them like there is now.”
Heath Cline, executive producer and contributor to the syndicated Chuck Oliver Show , has been going to SEC Media Days since 1995. This year, he was at the Big 12, ACC, American and SEC events. Every conference is trying to accomplish something different, so that means Cline faces different levels of difficulty depending on where he is.
“[The ACC’s] brand is ‘We’re swell, and we want you to talk to our coaches and players and learn how swell we are.’ And there’s a lot more coordination here,” he said when we spoke at the ACC event in Charlotte. “SEC is 100% you eat what you kill. You will get no help from the SEC, with the exception of [Greg] Sankey and, like, the officials supervisor. Everything else? Forget it. Even if WFAN shows up for some reason at SEC Media Days, it’s like, ‘Okay, well, you can send the same email to the Alabama SID as the guy from Dothan did.’”
Every conference is out to make news. Look at the Big 12’s announcement with Monster Energy Drink . A conference selling naming rights to all of its sports and an energy drink company releasing an exclusive flavor for each of the eighteen schools is really different and, of course, got a lot of attention. But these events are for the college football version of the people that slept in line to get tickets for Star Wars Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace in 1999.
Nowhere is that more true than in the SEC. Josh Pate knows that. He went down to Tampa to see the friends and have the conversations he’ll need to shape his thoughts on the likes of Alabama, Georgia and LSU, but he was also there to educate his national audience .
“This really hit home during the World Cup and watching the people around the sport explain it to me like I’m five, because in soccer terms, I am,” he told me. “There isn’t time to do that in the third quarter of a big game in October. I don’t need to tell Terry in Trussville, AL or Valdosta, GA about media days. They’ve been locked into it for forever . But there’s a guy in like Schenectady, NY that’s watching First Take or SportsCenter or Get Up . Maybe he watches the big games, but he doesn’t know anything about the culture of college football at media days.”
Pat Smith has experienced media days in all kinds of ways. Not only did he attend the SEC event every year when it was in Hoover, AL’s Winfrey Hotel, but he did it as Paul Finebaum’s original producer. Now he hosts his own radio show on WJOX in Birmingham.
“From about 2001 on, it kind of became a fan freak fest out front. You had people dressing up. You had, one year, the infamous Auburn fan who actually dyed their dog orange and blue,” he said. “And then, of course, you had all your Alabama fans who were dressed up and doing the things that they would do.
“Once podcasts and bloggers and stuff like that became more of an everyday type of deal for fans, all of a sudden those guys that were on one side of the rope were having booths right next to radio stations and right next to media conglomerates. So that was something to try to get used to, but just like everything else in our business, it’s evolved to the point where a lot of these people now, they’ve got a great following.”
Meet Tiger Jake, a Maltese dyed into an Auburn Tiger. Owner says it takes a full day at the groomer. #SECMD17 now officially off the rails. pic.twitter.com/hc35AB9MfK
— Chase Goodbread (@ChaseGoodbread) July 13, 2017
While plenty of reporters go on the radio shows that show up for events, and some radio hosts do home-and-home exchanges, Finebaum and Pate are legitimate celebrities to college football fans. At SEC Media Days, where stations don’t get a lot of help setting up interviews with players and coaches, media members of that stature may be the biggest names a station gets all week.
“I’ve probably responded to about a dozen requests to hook up ...
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