Brent Musburger has called his final college football game, hanging up the play-by-play headset for good following tomorrow night’s Georgia-Kentucky basketball game. This means Musburger’s final college game was marred by some poorly-worded comments regarding former Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon, wishing the player a long NFL career while discussing recently-surfaced video showing him hitting a female Oklahoma student in 2014.
Blowback was such that he felt compelled to defend those comments one quarter later of OU’s eventual win in the Sugar Bowl.
In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Musburger insisted the comments had nothing to do with the departure and, in fact, received very little attention from ESPN or Disney proper.
“We had already started the process of me leaving,” Musburger said. “The morning after the Sugar Bowl I had breakfast with [ESPN president] John Skipper and [senior vice president of event & studio production] Stephanie Druley, and they wanted to work out a plan to keep me at ESPN. There was not even a discussion about what had been said specifically about Mixon. In fact, the only person who mentioned it to me was a telephone call two days later from [Disney chairman] Bob Iger, who is an old friend, and he said, ‘This too shall pass.’ That was the only comment. There was no blowback. There is absolutely no connection.
“I did not want them to be in the middle [of gambling issues]. I am sure they have had some phone calls about [gambling] comments that I have made on the air over the years. It certainly never came back to me, but I have no doubt it happened. I just wanted no connection whatsoever. I will tell you that my relations with ESPN and everyone there could not be better. We have been completely up front in this process. I leave with nothing but good feelings about these people. I never had a bad day for them and enjoyed it very much.”
Musburger is leaving to join a sports book start up in Las Vegas while co-hosting a gambling talk show on SiriusXM, appropriately titled My Friends in the Desert.