Colin Cowherd

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Colin Cowherd (born January 1964), sometimes nicknamed "C-Dub," is an American sports radio personality. He is currently the host of The Herd with Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio.

1 Career
2 Quotes about his style
3 Regular targets
4 Controversy
5 Trivia
6 References
7 See also
8 External links

Career

Raised in Grayland, Washington, he pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree from Eastern Washington University before dropping out prior to graduation.

In 1985, Cowherd began his broadcast career as the play-by-play voice for the Pacific Coast League's Las Vegas Stars. He eventually became sports director at KVBC-TV in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he was named Nevada's Sportscaster of the Year five times. He also served as sports anchor at WTVT-TV in Tampa, Florida. He moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1996, where he spent nearly eight years at KGW Northwest NewsChannel 8, working as a sports anchor and hosting the 30-minute 'A guy's take on football' program. In 2001, The Herd moved from an afternoon time slot on all-sports radio KFXX to the morning drive time.

In 2004, he was the surprise pick to replace Tony Kornheiser for the late morning time slot on ESPN Radio. His show is an eclectic mixture of sports, pop culture, politics (he is a self professed moderate: conservative on economics and liberal on social issues), off-the-wall commentary, and his observations of everyday life.

Quotes about his style

In an October 2003 article about Cowherd in the Portland Tribune, he commented on his broadcasting style: "My sense of humor is not for everybody. I would bomb in a Rust Belt, X's-and-O's, beer belly market. I relate to a guy who loves sports but who have never played. I think radio maximizes my act and TV minimizes many of my talents. TV, in some strange, unexplainable way, invalidates people. But the truth is radio (for a sportscaster) is much more difficult, takes far more skill and is much more challenging."
While The Herd is a sports show, he doesn't take sports overly serious and is sometimes regarded to be at his most entertaining when sports is a secondary concern. Celebrities and popular culture frequently draw analysis and their fair share of scorn. Cowherd, though, tempers his biting critiques with irreverent-yet-pointed punchlines. While discussing the size of a purported cash settlement after actor Russell Crowe (the subject of a recent lawsuit in which he was convicted of assaulting a hotel employee by hitting him in the head with a thrown telephone) Cowherd told his audience "For that amount of money I'd stand there and let John Goodman throw his colon at me."
On Thanksgiving weekend of 2006, he told the Los Angeles Times, "I've always had sort of a West Coast lean," he said. "When I came to ESPN, I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great for the people on the West Coast if I was a part of you?' I always thought of ESPN as an East Coast company. During my job interview, I said, 'Don't take this personally, I'm a West Coast guy. I don't know if it is against the rules, but I'm going to bring up USC football.' "^[1]

Regular targets

Cowherd does have several targets he criticizes, often for entertainment & comedic effect. Among them:

"Homers" who take their home teams so seriously that they lose objective viewpoints about the reality of the sports. Red Sox & University of Alabama football fans top the list. On the Alabama coaching job: "Bama fan sees committed. Premiere coaches think they should be committed. They just don't get it. Re-cola Re-dicula"
".edu guy" (men that have spent most of their adult life in a college setting and are bookishly smart, but out of touch with reality).
The University of Virginia for allegedly being "soft" and therefore unable to compete at the highest levels of athleticism.
Fans of professional wrestling and monster truck rallies, who he regularly calls "booger eaters" and "mouth breathers" and "tornado bait".
Some celebrities, like Paris Hilton, for a perceived narcissism.
HOTT Prospects are minor league baseball players that hardly ever amount to anything. Cowherd can't stand the "Maybe's" when it comes to how good they "might be."

Cowherd also likes to gently goof on his wife Kim for her occasional empty-headed moment, though he makes up for this by constantly complimenting her looks, good spirit, athleticism, and her ability to keep him "real." The couple has two children.^[1]

A self-proclaimed college football junkie, The Herd has a daily segment called "The Daily Football Fix",^[2] a segment entirely devoted to talking about NCAA college football or the NFL, usually with a coach or ex-player analyzing. Other regular segments include the title "Spanning The Globe", a closer look at the people making sports headlines from the reporters covering sports in a particular regions or towns. He also has a weekly segment called "Monday Morning Riff", which Cowherd created in early 2005, a section of air in which Cowherd airs his sometimes off-the-wall thoughts concisely and sharply. During "The Riff", clips from Van Halen's first album are playing in the background. "Spanning the Globe" is also a segment on SportsCenter Sunday morning.

Colin Cowherd was Sports Illustrated's 2005 Radio Personality of the year.

Controversy

In November 2005, Cowherd was criticized for his treatment of the death of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) wrestler Eddie Guerrero. Cowherd used the phrase "who cares" in regards to Guerrero's death, saying it was not newsworthy. Cowherd was also quoted as saying "he passed away doing steroids", incorrectly implying that Guerrero's death had been directly caused by steroid use (Guerrero's autopsy showed that steroid abuse was not the cause of his death from congestive heart failure, although it may have exacerbated his condition).^[3] Many wrestling fans were outraged, and Cowherd was publicly reprimanded by ESPN ombudsman George Solomon and ESPN Radio general manager Bruce Gilbert.[1]

In March 2006, Cowherd was criticized for using content from a website (http://michiganzone.blogspot.com) without crediting it.^[4]^[5] Colin then labeled the creators of the website "whiners" in an e-mail and claimed they would never get credit. Credit was later given and an apology was issued on a napkin from Applebee's.^[6]

Trivia

Cowherd was inspired to become a sportscaster after listening to Vin Scully broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games on clear channel radio station KFI.
Cowherd got his first job after attending the baseball winter meetings in San Diego, California.^[1]