What Mike Golic, Mike Golic Jr. Hope to Accomplish in ESPN Return

Mike Golic and Mike Golic Jr., make their return to ESPN Radio on Aug. 3. Ahead of the debut of The Golics, The father-son duo spoke to Front Office Sports about what they hope to accomplish in their return to ESPN, whether Notre Dame will join a college football conference in the next decade, their favorite meal at their breakfast haunt in Connecticut, and if Golic Jr. has given any thought to becoming a full-fledged food influencer. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Front Office Sports: I’m going to start off with the most important question of the interview. What is your go-to order at The Harvest Cafe in Simsbury? 

Mike Golic: It is, without question, some sort of pastry that is not just a pastry—it’s a pastry that’s made into a breakfast. They are so good at turning it into a full fledged breakfast. And they’re so great there. Anytime we walk in, Scott, who runs the place, always gives us monster appetizers that are always so hard to finish but are absolute gold. 

Mike Golic Jr.: I’m inspired, because I literally just yesterday had my Harvest Cafe shirt on and the first line said dirt bomb. So I’ll always go to the dirt bomb. That’s the one they used to slice and then griddle for us, which is the best. The cinnamon sugar whipped cream is, without question, the best whipped cream there is known to mankind. 

FOS: Mike Sr: You’ve accomplished just a ton in your broadcasting career. What makes you want to keep going as opposed to just kicking back and relaxing, enjoying your grandkids and doing whatever you want every day? 

MG: Well, I mean, I definitely have been doing that. Being a grandparent is just an awesome experience. But listen, I have to say, even though he’s sitting here on this call as well, it’s working with my son. I mean, who couldn’t ask for anything better than that? Really, in any line of work, to be able to work with one of your kids, and I have three kids, and my wife and I are very close—I talk to them all every day. But to be able to do a show with one for a number of years, I don’t know how long I would be in the business anymore if I wasn’t doing a show with Mike. 

I’ll always call games like I do. But as far as an everyday show, it’s definitely getting to work with my son. Now, I wish you would bend the knee a little bit more toward me…

MGJ: Here we go…

MG: Show a little bit more, Father, how can I learn from you? But I don’t really get that [laughing]. But it’s really what has me continuing to go. That and my wife is not ready for me to retire. 

FOS: Do you feel like you have unfinished business at ESPN? 

MG: No. Not unfinished business. I look at it more as I get to come home. I didn’t think I would get a chance to come back to ESPN, so I’m looking at it as a chance to come home to where it all started and hopefully do this for a number of years. My career at ESPN started back in 1995, so yeah, I look at it completely as I get to kind of come home again. 

FOS: You guys have done the radio, which you’re returning to, and it’s very regimented by the clock, and you have to get out for the breaks and have the segments be crisp. And then in between, you had these digital shows, which sometimes they can have a set time, but other times they can be meandering, and you really aren’t beholden to any clock. What’s it like going back to more regimented programming?

MGJ: I would say it’s exciting. I think the one thing I’ve always known about myself, but that I’ve learned through so much of this now, is I’m always going to be an offensive lineman—which means I like rules. I like to know, alright, where are the lines and then let me go and color in them. And I always appreciated that radio had very clearly defined walls and then a space that you got to play with. And, again, from football, we’re used to short bursts where you go and make things happen.

Even as I enjoyed everything that we got to do—we got to work with so many great people at the last couple of spots that we were at—I got to try out and sharpen new skills. But as we got towards this point where this became a reality, the chance to go back and do radio, which, yeah, it does have rules, but it’s also gritty. It’s extremely personal. It’s like the original longform audio medium. And you get to reach out and touch people. You’re with people in all these intimate spots in their lives.

There’s just a connective point to it, a community point to it, and something that feels very much like home. It’s just with radio as a medium that I always really enjoyed and excited to get back to. I got to live it so much through dad for so many years, and then it was where I got my start in this industry. And so I think I’ve always carried a real fondness just for radio as a medium. 

MG: Mike talked about old linemen and football. I look at it as an athlete, and Mike and I, for so much of our lives, athletes live a life of an itinerary. You’re told where to go. You’re told how long you’re supposed to do something. Everything’s laid out for you, and that’s the format of live radio, right?

Everything’s kind of laid out for you. Of course, I’ve been doing it for over 25 years, the radio format, so that’s not difficult to jump back into it. Quite honestly, if we’re late for a break or something, I’ll just blame the producer, Devin Kane. That seems easy enough. I’ll just point the finger at him. 

FOS: If you were the commissioner of college football, and you could create how many teams are in the playoffs, what are the rules with NIL and the portal and everything along that matter? 

MG: I like 12. You know, you go to 16, you go to 24 … Coaches like that because they can say, ‘hey, we’re in the playoffs.’ I’m fine with 12. You see the NCAA Tournament in basketball going to 70-something. I’m good with 12. I can live with anything. 

As far as rules, NIL, there’s going to be not a whole lot you can do about it. You got revenue sharing from the lawsuit, you have NIL. That’s not going to stop. To use a ridiculous term, you’re not going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube on that one. The portal is where I think they need to get more strict. You can’t have somebody being a free agent every single year. They have better free agency than the NFL. I know they’re already fixing the calendar a bit as far as when you can move, but that to me wreaks more havoc than the money, is the portal.

Because all you hear about from the portal are the success stories. You don’t hear about the guys who try and transfer and don’t end up anywhere or transfer somewhere and don’t end up playing. And they have a choice, and sometimes they use their choices too many times. I think that could be fixed. 

MGJ: I agree with Dad. I like 12. You’re going to have an argument for someone getting left out no matter what you expand it to. But I would just like to see 12 for longer, quite honestly. We had a decade of a four-team playoff and got to understand what made it tick. The changes in the sport created more teams that are more competitive now, so I think 12 works.

But I’d like to stick with that. And then if you’re going to change anything else, it’s the two words we all keep talking about: collective bargaining. You want to actually have rules enforceable with the portal by collectively bargaining that get these guys a voice. I think my problem with the way we’re going about trying to kind of put some of that toothpaste back in is it robs the players of a chance to have an impact or a say-so on what goes on in the future of the sport. Do you want to add more games to the schedule by expanding the playoff? Do you want to change their mobility without limiting the mobility of coaches or anybody else here in a way that feels more reminiscent of what we had before? And I’ll agree, to an extent, that was unfair. 

Collectively bargain, make the contracts real and enforceable—then you can have something that maybe resembles more of the salary cap they tried to make work and enforce here and you go from there.

FOS: If we were to take a time machine into 2036, 10 years in the future, has Notre Dame joined a conference or are they still independent—and why? 

MG: Wow, that’s a great question. So Mike and I kind of differ on where we think the NCAA will end up. This talk of the SEC breaking off is fool’s gold. That’s ridiculous. On God’s green earth, this will never happen. 

Now, will football break away from the other sports? That could be a possibility, whether it’s the Power Four or more schools than the Power Four breaking away. Listen: if Notre Dame has to abide by rules that were less constructive to be independent, they’ll go into a conference. But until then, why would they? I see change moving very, very slowly in college as far as that’s concerned because people just can’t get on the same page. So I will say Notre Dame will still be independent. 

MGJ: I’ll say that, too, I think mostly out of hoping that Dad’s right. Change has been so fast and furious, really, since we got the announcement that Texas and Oklahoma were heading to the SEC and that USC and UCLA and the rest of these teams were heading to the Big Ten. It seems like we’ve been drinking it through a firehose. So I would like to believe Notre Dame’s still independent because that would mean, alright, we still have the conference system at least somewhat resembling what we have now. We still have a sport that is leaning into the regionality, even though those lines have been blurred by conferences that have added more and more people. 

So I say this maybe out of hope as much as anything, because there is part of me that believes in college football Pangea. The “super league” stuff that’s been whispered about in corners forever is a possibility, but I’ll say the Irish are still independent and people are still mad about it.

FOS: Another food question for Junior: Have you considered becoming an official food influencer as a side gig with the amount of engagement you get on your snack posts? 

MGJ: It’s a great question. I absolutely have. The problem I’ve run into is this, and my dad has often pointed this out—I don’t know how to take a TV bite. I’m sure there are plenty of food influencers that just take a little nibble. It’s like when you go wine tasting and you take a sip and then you spit the rest and you’re not falling all over yourself. If I have it, I’m going to eat it all. 

Also: until Oreos starts selling specialty flavors in a two-pack or a single sleeve, that means I’ve consumed a lot of that. And as someone that is getting ready to try and fit into a tux for my wedding sometime in the next year, I also have to sit next to my very skinny, very in-shape 63-year-old father—who already has a better head of hair than me, that couldn’t let me have the beard and now has that too—I have to try and lose weight so I don’t look like a tick sitting next to him while he’s svelte and in shape and being lusted after by everyone that watches him on the outside. 

I’m trying to find a way to do the food influencer deal without eating a number of calories that’s going to subvert all the goals I have in other areas of my life. 

MG: I would say don’t change. Listen, it would be so weird if you took a little mini bite and then maybe spit it out so then you could start to talk. You need to take your big bite. It’s just hilarious. There’s always eight-to-ten seconds of silence after he takes a bite of anything because it’s too big a bite. That’s his charm. So I say keep doing it. 

FOS: What do you hope to accomplish in this reborn ESPN run? 

MG: This isn’t a new show. We’ve been together since the end of my time at ESPN with Mike and Trey Wingo, and then Mike and I in the last few iterations. There’s no show that’s reinventing the wheel, right? Sports talk is sports talk. It’s just the personalities. And as Mike stated earlier, and why we love it—the people who listen to live radio, and obviously the podcasts involved as well, you get to know them.

It’s about content, certainly, number one, but then it’s getting to know the personalities and knowing their families and how much we’re willing to lay out there. And over the years, we’ve laid out a bunch of our family over time. So that’s not really going to change. 

So what do we hope to accomplish, then? I just hope to keep working with Mike for a number of years and keep doing the show the way that I’ve done it for 25, 30 years. That means to give people information and take them where they can’t go on the field or in the locker room or in the weight room, preparing for a major college or a pro team. Tell them something, have them learn something they didn’t know and make them laugh.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do since I started local radio in 1995 till now, and that’s not going to change. I don’t know if that’s too old-school or that’s not growing with the times, but that’s kind of how I like to do a show. 

MGJ: Yeah, I think Dad’s right, and I think really it’s always kind of been about making people feel like they’re a part of the family and a part of the home.

I think the show being called The Golics kind of reeks of that. Like, hey, for two hours a day, we get to bring people onto the couch that was in our living room for years where we were having these conversations when I was growing up or when I got into the job. The best notes that we got when we were finishing up Golic and Wingo and Dad was finishing up his time at that point with ESPN Radio, were the ones that came from people that got to work with their mom or dad or with their son or daughter who said, “When I watch and listen to you guys, I see a bit of myself and I see a bit of that relationship that I have.” 

And if it’s someone who, unfortunately, has lost a parent and pines for that feeling, or someone you know that gets the chance to do it and just chuckles about the disagreements that pop up, because you know there’s a lot of love, but there’s also the things that naturally happen, the friction between parents and their children that people can empathize with. 

They see themselves with, and so I think if we get two hours a day where it feels like people are coming and [proverbially] sitting down at the end of the bar with us, or sitting down with us on the couch in our house, and turn off the rest of what’s going on in their world for a little bit and feel some of that familial vibe and feel like they’re one of us for a little bit, then we’ve done something right.

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