Longtime Alabama sports journalists Scott Griffin, Kevin Scarbinsky launch new show on CBS 42

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. ( WIAT ) — When Scott Griffin and Kevin Scarbinsky first started thinking about what they wanted their new sports talk show to be, they started with a mission statement.

“This will be like a radio show on television,” Scarbinsky said.

Something spontaneous, unscripted and unpredictable was what they wanted.

“There’s a freedom to go anywhere you want to go,” Griffin said.

At 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Griffin and Scarbinsky will debut their new sports talk show, “College Football Saturday,” on CBS 42. The show will feature opinions and discussion between Griffin, sports analyst for CBS 42, and Scarbinsky. It will air for 30 minutes every Saturday night on CBS 42 during the football season.

The two journalists’ first collaboration was back in 2012 when they teamed up for a radio show, “Smashmouth Radio,” on Tide 102.9. Over the course of several years, the show grew to one of the more popular sports radio programs in the Birmingham area.

For Griffin, who has covered Alabama sports for over 30 years, he wanted to bring more of an opinion-based sports show to local TV, something that has shown to have success to on networks like ESPN and other places.

“The average fans these days are so knowledgeable these days that trying to do TV the way we did 25 years ago, where you’re going over stats and highlights, isn’t going to cut it,” Griffin said. “They know the stats, so you have to have an opinion.”

For Scarbinsky, the show marks an ongoing return to the sports conversation in Alabama. For nearly 30 years, he was the lead sports columnist at The Birmingham News before briefly stepping away from the grind of daily journalism in 2018.

“I wanted to do different things,” Scarbinsky said about leaving one of the top perches in Alabama sports journalism at the time. “Primarily, I wanted to be there for my sons. I didn’t want to be in Dallas for a week covering college football while my son was playing a game.”

A couple of years ago, Scarbinsky began to make his way back into sports journalism, first with a weekly column with AL.com’s The Lede. He said he wanted to be part of a show that was both part of the conversation around sports but also had a freewheeling aspect to it.

“It won’t seem repetitive because every show will be different,” Scarbinsky said. “You won’t always know what you get.”

The show comes at a time when when the game of college football is changing in real time. With conference mergers, players being able to make money on themselves through NIL deals and new coaches joining legacy programs, the sport has changed a lot in recent years.

These changes don’t bother Griffin. If anything, it just gives him and Scarbinsky more incentive to give something to an audience that they can’t find anywhere else.

“You have to have enough opinion and knowledge to deliver it in a new way,” he said.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the show would be theater of opinion or be provocative for the sake of being provocative.

“We want our show to be opinionated, but it has to be genuine, authentic opinion,” Griffin said. “It’s all genuine, like we’re siting on the back deck, grilling and talking about sports.”

Scarbinsky said despite the game being radically different than when he first started covering it, what has lasted is the connection fans have with the players and what they do on the field.

“It still comes down to what comes down in those 60 minutes in a game,” Scarbinsky said. “That’s why people watch. That’s why people care. The game still matters. As long as that’s still the case, I will be there.”

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to CBS 42.