Van Lathan is a newcomer in the college football content universe, but he can already see it changing after star podcaster Josh Pate’s recent interview with President Donald Trump.

Lathan, a vocal LSU fan who began cohosting Ringer Tailgate for Bill Simmons’ The Ringer last fall, is also a politics and culture commentator at the network. And he believes that Pate’s inability to read the political headwinds of the moment has blown up in his face.

Pate’s controversial sitdown with Trump at a recent political event in Georgia forced the podcaster to record a lengthy explanation. After posting the interview as part of a longer live stream, Pate turned off comments and later deleted the standalone version on YouTube.

Watching Pate battle with the reaction to the interview and the significant criticism he received, Lathan believes the rest of college football media is taking notes — or should be.

“Josh, and probably the college football world, learned some lessons here. We know that there’s a conservative leaning within the college football world, we talk about it all the time,” Lathan said this week on Ringer Tailgate. “But President Trump is a deeply divisive character, it’s just a fact.”

Whereas Lathan believes many college football commentators made supposedly apolitical comments in the past to keep left-leaning ideas out of the sport, this was seemingly an example in which Pate ran afoul even of the typical conservative college football audience.

“I think what they found out is having Donald Trump on our college football podcast is not a lot, a sizable, a growing number of college football fans’ favorite thing,” he explained. “And there will be a cost.”

Later, Lathan suggested he had spoken with Pate directly about the situation. Lathan nodded to the career opportunity presented for Pate in this instance, and many aspire to host a more casual conversation with Trump.

But Lathan likened Pate’s miscue to similar regretful interviews hosted by comedians and other non-political commentators during the 2024 campaign, many of whom have publicly expressed regret for doing so.

“This was not worth it. The juice was not worth the squeeze here,” Lathan said.

“And I understand how some people would say interviewing the president is this ridiculously prestigious thing, but I think it’s also important to be in tune in the moment with people’s feelings. Maybe we will get back to a point one day where we can have conversations with the leader of the country, and those conversations won’t be colored by people feeling like their lives are on the line and all that stuff. But we’re not there now.”

Throughout his lengthy explanation in the livestream, Pate stated his hope was to pick Trump’s mind about potential efforts by his administration to address the chaos surrounding college football. Trump’s answers, in turn, were meandering and disinterested.

Lathan said that while he is sympathetic to the idea that putting Trump’s platform in front of fans is reasonable, the time and place here in early 2026 were anything but reasonable.

“If you’ve got the president coming on your podcast, when he was campaigning, it was one thing,” Lathan said. “(But) Alex Pretti and Renee Good are dead, you want to really have a conversation about NIL? That’s a decision that everyone would have to make, but g*ddamn, that’s a tough choice to make at this particular time right now. And I think it was an unforced error.”