Kirk Herbstreit is promising to give himself just a little more “me” time this football season.
Herbstreit is entering his second season running the gauntlet of doing Thursday night NFL games on Amazon’s Prime Video, combined with his ESPN responsibilities for “College GameDay” and Saturday night’s primetime game of the week.
On a Zoom call hosted by Amazon on Monday, The Post asked the 54-year-old Herbstreit what he’s going to be doing differently now that he’s had a year of establishing chemistry with Michaels and adapting to weekly professional football games under his belt.
“I’m gonna chill,” Herbstreit laughed.
“Last year I know I was taking on something that was kind of unprecedented, really, doing an NFL game on a Thursday and then doing a three-hour ‘College GameDay’ studio show at a national level, and then calling a Saturday night game. There’s a lot of preparation.”
Looking back, Herbstreit recognizes the “toll” the relentless work schedule was taking on him, and he plans to better compartmentalize his day, if even for an hour or two.
“The execution of the actual job and those three gigs for me is fun, if I’ve done my prep, and I’ve built my entire career on being prepared, and having all the answers, and what I learned is I didn’t get to go to dinner with Al, Kaylee [Hartung] and our entire crew enough,” Herbstreit continued.
“Or just go get a workout. I cannot tell you how much I prepared, because I didn’t want to let anyone down, including myself.
“And so, if I was awake, I was preparing. And, that’s great, but man, that takes a toll on you and it takes away from the fun aspect of what we’re doing.”
Herbstreit concluded with more of the message that he can better “recalibrate” now that he knows what’s in store.
“And so, I have a lot of respect for all three properties that I work for, but going through that last year and over-preparing really helped me to understand what I need to do to recalibrate to get ready for this second year and really making this run,” he said.