Kirk Herbstreit nearly missed kickoff on Saturday, and Ole Miss’s Vaught-Hemingway Stadium is to blame.
Herbstreit and his crew, including his son Ty and longtime security aide Kinley, a former New York City police officer, boarded the aging, narrow elevator inside the 111-year-old Stadium on their way up to the ESPN booth. Herbstreit admitted upfront on his Nonstop podcast with Joey Galloway that he’s mildly claustrophobic, but figured an eight-second ride wasn’t worth worrying about.
“It’s an old elevator. It’s a little small. I’m a little claustrophobic,” he said. “But you know what, we’re going to go from ground level to the booth. Just breathe. You can get through it. It’s going to take eight seconds, right?”
@kirkherbstreitI was about to be in panic mode… Shout out to Kinley 😂♬ original sound – Kirk Herbstreit
It took considerably longer than eight seconds. The lights cut out almost immediately, and the operator radioed that the building’s entire west side had lost power. Herbstreit said the first minute and a half didn’t bother him much, since he assumed the power would kick back on. By the two-minute mark, that confidence was gone.
“I’m breathing like that, trying not to let my son know I am in a bit of a pickle mentally right now,” he admitted.
Kinley went to work prying the doors open, eventually forcing apart both the inner doors and the steel outer ones with help from another man in the elevator, all while Herbstreit stood sweating against the back wall with a live broadcast bearing down on him. When the doors finally gave way, the group discovered the elevator had stopped between floors, leaving a four-and-a-half to five-foot drop to solid ground. Kinley led everyone out, and the doors slammed shut again the instant they cleared it.
Given how tight the timeline already was, it makes you wonder what ESPN’s actual backup plan would’ve been if they hadn’t made it in time. The network has had one ready before — in 2024, when Herbstreit was racing to Texas-Oklahoma straight from College GameDay in Oregon — Jordan Rodgers was on standby in case he didn’t make it. Whether anyone was on similar standby in Oxford isn’t clear, but a few more minutes stuck in that elevator and we might have found out.
Somehow, that wasn’t even the strangest thing that happened to Herbstreit during Saturday’s broadcast. Later in the game, viewers heard him yelp mid-replay after what he initially believed was a bat flew into the booth and smacked his clipboard. It turned out to be an enormous grasshopper.
“I thought it was a bat flying in,” Herbstreit said. “This thing was massive.”
This was a first… that grasshopper was HUGE 🤣🤣 @cbfowlerpic.twitter.com/7MaY7xBF48
— Kirk Herbstreit (@KirkHerbstreit) September 20, 2026
Herbstreit likely departed Oxford with little affection for the media accommodations at Ole Miss. He wouldn’t be the first to feel that way. Sean McDonough branded the school’s press box the worst in college football earlier this year, condemning it as too cramped to fit a fourth person and so poorly angled that the sun scorches the broadcast crew during noon kickoffs.
The next time ESPN sends a crew to Vaught-Hemingway, it might want to pack sunglasses, bug repellent, and a reminder to take the stairs.