Kirk Minihane’s return to radio will come as…a Barstool Radio co-host during Super Bowl Week?

The last few months have seen a lot of twists for Kirk Minihane, who took leave from WEEI in August to address mental health concerns, then went on indefinite leave in September. In early November, he sent some tweets about how he was ready to return, but kept from doing so by station management, and then WEEI parent Entercom announced that Minihane would instead shift to their national Radio.com platform, relaunching his podcast and a column in January and then adding that he “will launch a new national daily radio show with a new co-host early in 2019.”

His podcast is up, but his show is still in the works, and he’ll first be appearing in an unconventional space: Barstool Radio. Barstool’s Dave Portnoy announced Wednesday that Minihane will be co-hosting with him from Atlanta for three days next week:

So as everybody knows by now Barstool Radio is gonna be at the Ivy in Buckhead all next week. We will be live from 12-6 everyday. My show Barstool Radio will be on the air from 4-6 and I just confirmed that Kirk Minihane will be co-hosting with us for the entire show Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. That pretty much makes it appointment listening each of those days.

Meanwhile, Minihane’s Radio.com show is still coming. He released an update on that on his latest podcast, saying he’s planning to host it solo at first with rotating guest hosts before finding a full-time co-host and mentioning that he has a place and a timeslot lined up (albeit not announced yet). But even that included him commenting that it had been an uncertain journey, saying “I feel much, much, much better now on 50 different levels than I did, say, a week ago, 10 days ago. 10 days ago, I was in a slump, I was thinking ‘This show’s not going to happen, we’re doing nothing,’ but we’ve been really, really proactive and taken some big steps forward, so I’m encouraged about that.”

This Barstool co-hosting gig might actually make a fair bit of sense as a way for Minihane to promote his upcoming show. Barstool Radio has a significant profile normally, and that’s likely only to rise during Super Bowl Week; co-hosting a show there should help him get the word out that he’ll have his own show coming soon. And this makes some sense for Barstool, too; Portnoy’s long expressed some admiration for Minihane, and offered him a job amidst the WEEI saga, and now they have a pretty well-known voice as a special guest co-host for part of Super Bowl Week. But we’ll see how this plays out.

[Barstool Sports; photo from a WGBH interview of Minihane on YouTube]