Brooks Austin

Brooks Austin covers Georgia football for a living, and he spent the ten years before that on his father's road construction crews.

Brad Banyas had met Austin a couple of times at Classic City before the episode, and brought him onto the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast as the film guy and editor of Dawgs Daily. Austin's first move was to tell the audience that Brad had admitted, off air, to not knowing who Stephen A. Smith was. Brad had also assumed for a while that Austin was not from Georgia. Austin says nobody can place his accent. A neighbor recently guessed the Bronx. The two of them spent most of the hour not talking about football.

Austin live streams Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. He built the first version of his set himself, two boards put together in his driveway and moved into the garage of his old house, and he is about to open a much larger studio. He was not a gifted athlete when he played, so he learned to read where the ball was going off film instead, and that study is what he sells now. His opening segment is called Nothing but Rants, topics he says he is oddly passionate about. He judges his own work by the mute test: with the sound off, a viewer should still be able to tell he had been looking forward to this all day. Every spring he drives the state to watch high school players. This year he saw 37 schools in 17 days, from northwest Georgia down to Valdosta.

The playing record was five years of college football and seven wins. He came out of it with his body hurting and his brain hurting, and wanted nothing to do with the game. He went into his father's road construction business instead, which he worked from 16 to 26 and was expected to take over, all while skipping class to listen to Dan Patrick on the radio. Once he committed to media, the cost showed up in his phone. He carries two. The old 404 number never rings. A friend who stood two people behind his best man at his wedding did not invite him to his own bachelor party, because Austin had been in a lab for four years. He says that hurt, and then he decided it was the price of doing the thing he was supposed to be doing. He cut out alcohol in February of last year.

On one drive home during that spring school tour, exhausted and ninety minutes out from an hour of solo live stream with no notes and no plan, Austin put his problem on his producers and his wife. The producers sent topics back until he had a show. When he walked in the door his coffee was already poured and there was a note sitting next to it. He had not told his wife he was struggling.