Rece Davis expresses one regret about Ted Cruz interview on ‘College GameDay’

Last Saturday, Rece Davis interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for nearly 10 minutes on ESPN's College GameDay , live from Austin, Texas. Cruz co-authored the Protect College Sports Act , a bipartisan bill aiming to shift power back to the NCAA and universities in response to the NIL and player empowerment boom.

The legislation is nuanced and tedious, but the backlash to Cruz's GameDay appearance has been plain as day.

Cruz was relentlessly booed for the duration of his GameDay segment, and everyone from the NAACP and Bomani Jones reprimanded ESPN for its slanted coverage of the Protect College Sports Act.

On Friday, Kirk Herbstreit pleaded apolitical and claimed he didn't know anything about Cruz, which drew even more intense backlash . Davis also offered his perspective to Mississippi Today ahead of GameDay taking over Ole Miss's campus on Saturday morning.

When asked about GameDay 's responsibility to platform dissenting voices, Davis expressed one regret from his interview with Cruz.

"We asked him a question about some of the things, like compensation ," Davis said. "In a longer forum, of course they do. I mean, you have to present both sides of it. And I think that we've had a number of people on our air, not necessarily just on that show, but over the years — you don't have to look very far to find people who have been critical of this legislation."

"In that instance, I would love to have gotten to another question representing the other side to hear his response on it," Davis continued. "But at the same time, I don't think that we wanted to turn the whole show into crossfire. It was a timely situation. He was on, and you know, it is what it is."

Read Davis's full comments about the controversial ordeal below.

"People are going to criticize anytime you do anything that touches politics, and this is political, though not partisan, because there's pending legislation. So, we thought it was a good opportunity to bring him on to talk about it since they were about to vote. I understand that some people would rather hear about football. We'd rather talk about football. We wish all these issues were easily solved and not on the forefront. But I think anytime you have something that is going to be as impactful on the sport as potentially this legislation could be — I'm not endorsing it. I am very familiar with it. I have some questions about it. A couple that I would like to have gotten to, one that I did get to, that are reasonable oppositions to this. At the same time, I think the need for structure is important. He, along with Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, they put forward this legislation. My sense of it is that the reaction was largely due to partisan politics, at least certainly there, and not necessarily a reaction to that particular piece of bipartisan legislation. Doesn't mean everybody supports it. A lot of people that I respect greatly and are very close to me, and I've talked about it extensively with [them], have really significant reservations about it. As do I, with some things. Our position was that the vote was coming. Here was an opportunity to talk to one of the guys who has been prominent in this and would be in position to best tell us whether this was actually going to be voted on. So, that's where we were."

"People are going to criticize anytime you do anything that touches politics, and this is political, though not partisan, because there's pending legislation. So, we thought it was a good opportunity to bring him on to talk about it since they were about to vote. I understand that some people would rather hear about football. We'd rather talk about football. We wish all these issues were easily solved and not on the forefront. But I think anytime you have something that is going to be as impactful on the sport as potentially this legislation could be — I'm not endorsing it. I am very familiar with it. I have some questions about it. A couple that I would like to have gotten to, one that I did get to, that are reasonable oppositions to this.

At the same time, I think the need for structure is important. He, along with Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, they put forward this legislation. My sense of it is that the reaction was largely due to partisan politics, at least certainly there, and not necessarily a reaction to that particular piece of bipartisan legislation. Doesn't mean everybody supports it. A lot of people that I respect greatly and are very close to me, and I've talked about it extensively with [them], have really significant reservations about it. As do I, with some things.

Our position was that the vote was coming. Here was an opportunity to talk to one of the guys who has been prominent in this and would be in position to best tell us whether this was actually going to be voted on. So, that's where we were."