Josh Pate: Donald Trump interview ‘didn’t go the way that I thought it was going to go’

Josh Pate spent the better part of the last couple of weeks getting interrogated about why he invited Donald Trump onto a college football podcast. Now he’s explaining what actually happened when he sat down with Trump, and the short version is that the interview he envisioned and the interview he got were not the same thing.

Pate addressed it on Barstool Sports’ Macrodosing podcast, explaining that the interview went sideways before he even asked a single question. The White House reached out, told him Trump wanted to do the show, and Pate said yes. He had already said as much publicly when he announced the booking, defending it against critics who argued he was handing Trump a friendly platform with zero pushback.

The expectation going in was 35 to 40 minutes. What he got was 10.

Trump’s team left Washington two hours behind schedule the morning of the Rome, Georgia, event, and the window Pate had been “promised” had already been compressed. By the time they were set up and ready, Pate was recalibrating on the fly, trying to figure out how to use 10 minutes with a subject who is famously capable of turning a single question into an eight-minute monologue that leaves no room for anything else.

“If I know I’ve got 10 minutes here,” Pate said, “do I run the risk of asking a really in-depth question that he just goes eight minutes on an answer? You didn’t even have an interview at that point.”

The result, by his own assessment, was an interview that didn’t have much “meat on the bone.”

“Suffice it to say, it didn’t go the way that I thought it was going to go,” Pate continued. “Not necessarily anyone’s fault or anything like that. But if I knew we were only going to get 10 as opposed to going in thinking 35-45, that’s a whole different ball game.”

Instead, Pate was left with a conversation that validated almost every concern critics had raised when the interview was announced. The popular college football analyst had gone out of his way to promise something specific — a president who understood the issues and engaged seriously with the questions that are actually reshaping college football — and the 10-minute version of events didn’t come close to delivering on that.

In fact, Trump seemed to have zero idea what Pate was talking about regarding college football, as Awful Announcing’s Sean Keeley noted.

Mike Ryan took a victory lap on The Dan Le Batard Show, calling it embarrassing and arguing that Trump got exactly what he came for while Pate got very little in return. The Ringer’s Van Lathan argued it was a lesson the entire college football media world should take notes on, saying that a growing portion of the college football audience simply does not want this, and that there will be a cost for not reading that particular room.

What Pate added during his Macrodosing appearance — which he didn’t divulge in his 20-minute follow-up — was that the conversation he had with Trump while crews were setting up was more substantive than anything that made it to air.

“He was really open,” Pate claimed. “It’s just me and him at a lunch table, basically talking like it’s your buddy on a Tuesday afternoon.”

According to Pate, Trump told him the NIL situation was a mess, that he was trying to get all the commissioners up to Washington for a roundtable, and that he wanted to understand what the federal government could actually do before making any moves. That roundtable is now set for later this week, featuring Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, and a range of conference commissioners.

So that’s where things stand. The college football media summit that Pate flew to Georgia, hoping to facilitate on camera, is happening, just without him at the table. The interview that was supposed to be the biggest booking of his career ended up being 10 minutes of Trump incoherently rambling about the NFL kickoff rules. And the most useful conversation he had all day was the one nobody filmed.