Kirk Herbstreit's microphone keeps experiencing problems in ESPN's Texas-Tennessee broadcast
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Arguably the biggest game of the Week 4 schedule of the 2026 college football season has come with some unexpected difficulties — not on the field, but in the broadcast booth.
ABC's broadcast of No. 1 Texas' game at No. 13 Tennessee at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee has been riddled with technical mishaps, particularly with color commentator Kirk Herbstreit's headset.
On three different occasions in the first quarter, Herbstreit's analysis came across on the air as staticky.
Right as Laura Rutledge explains Donald Trump's presence leading to communication issues for Texas and Tennessee, the ABC audio becomes a mess.
Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit try to deliver the play-by-play in a painful listen for ABC viewers. 🏈🎙️😵💫 pic.twitter.com/DAESHVhS7u
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) September 26, 2026
The ABC audio has remained problematic, particularly for Kirk Herbstreit. 🏈🎙️😵💫 https://t.co/Px80rR18h7pic.twitter.com/pjcleb0D4C
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) September 26, 2026
On the third instance, with the Longhorns driving into the Volunteers' red zone, play-by-play broadcaster Chris Fowler apologized for the continued snafus.
The errors coincided with President Donald Trump's visit to Knoxville for the game, where he's in attendance in a luxury box. This week, Texas coach Steve Sarkisian made headlines when he noted that the headsets that coaches utilize cut off when Trump is leaving the game, which he said happened to Miami coach Mario Cristobal in the fourth quarter of last season's national championship game against Indiana. The coach on the other sideline, Curt Cignetti, said there were two or three plays his coaches couldn't hear at all, though he downplayed its impact.
ESPN sideline reporter Laura Rutledge noted that the Texas and Tennessee staffs worked with the Secret Service to try to ensure that their radio frequencies would be clear. She added that both groups of coaches believed that coach-to-coach communication should be "perfectly OK," though they worried about coach-to-player communication. Should they encounter difficulties there, they'd switch to signals from the sideline to relay messages. Rutledge, citing sources close to the Secret Service, said that at major events like this game, "there's always going to be electromagnetic deconfliction. Spectrum deconfliction means coordinating radio frequency use so systems needed for the event can operate without interfering with one another."
Rutledge added that if there's a communication breakdown on the field that ABC could always take a TV timeout.
Immediately after Rutledge's report, and with about 10 minutes remaining in the first quarter, Fowler and Herbsteit's audio feeds with staticky when they began speaking.
It's quite possible that ESPN's audio issues aren't tied to Trump, who has been a semi-regular presence at college football games over the past several years without widespread issues with the television broadcasts.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kirk Herbstreit's microphone keeps experiencing problems in ESPN's Texas-Tennessee broadcast
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