Screenshot
On the afternoon of Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025, Matt Jones, 47, turned off the lights at his Louisville Highlands home, grabbed the keys to his black BMW, and went for a drive. He slowly made his way out of the city, the metro sprawl giving way to farmland. He passed through Bullitt, Spencer and Nelson counties. He didn’t have a destination in mind; his focus was on the radio broadcast of the first-round College Football Playoff matchup between Miami and Texas A&M—not the outcome of the game but the voices calling it.
Jones was scheduled to call a matchup of his own—the 2025 New Orleans Bowl between Southern Mississippi and Western Kentucky University on Dec. 23 alongside partner Myron Medcalf for ESPN Radio. It would be a new challenge for veteran radio host Jones. He had never called a live game.
The preparation in the weeks leading up to the assignment had been an arduous slog of research, annotation and rote memorization. Jones watched hours of film for both teams, dug up anecdotes about Hattiesburg and Bowling Green, and practiced live-calling other televised games. By the weekend of the CFP first round, just days before he was set to travel to New Orleans, he had done all he could do. The hay, as they say, was in the barn. Yet on Friday night, sitting in his home office listening to the Alabama-Oklahoma game that kicked off the weekend’s slate, he felt his confidence draining. The talent of the broadcasters was overwhelming. They were smooth, detailed and fast—so fast. There was no way he could do it like that.
The unease persisted into the next day. He considered calling ESPN to back out but instead opted for a change of scenery and hit the road. From the driver’s seat, he called friend and longtime broadcaster Tom Hart, who reassured him. Then, he turned on the radio. Marc Kestecher was on the call for the Miami-Texas A&M game. Kestecher’s cadence was relaxed. Still detailed, still precise, but at a brisk walk rather than a sprint.
“I started to realize how many different styles there were,” Jones remembered.
It was a relief. It was freeing. He kept driving and kept listening.
Jones’ professional life has taken place largely at the edge of his comfort zone. He left a stable career as a lawyer to run a sports blog, wrote an adversarial book about Mitch McConnell, and opened a restaurant. Even on his Kentucky Sports Radio show, the mainstay of his growing media portfolio, Jones and his co-hosts often veer away from their nominal focus of Kentucky Wildcat athletics and onto less-stable ground such as current events, statewide news and their personal lives.
But it’s the leap that makes life fun, Jones said, even more so when he can bring his collaborators, audience and state along with him.
• • •
Jones grew up in Middlesboro. His parents both worked, so he spent most of his free time at his grandparents’ house a mile across town. An only child, he entertained himself with backyard sports, shooting hoops or grabbing his old seven iron and a tennis ball for a round on his homemade golf course that included his grandparents’ yard and those of the half-dozen neighboring houses. He whacked the haggard ball along the edge of the canal out back, over his grandfather’s forgotten garden bed, between the houses and across Chester Avenue, aiming for telephone poles, tree trunks and clotheslines along the way.
Indoors, he read. He had a Sports Illustrated subscription and loved books about athletes. As he got older, mentors such as English teacher Billie Jo Booth and pastor Derek Penwell introduced him to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Harper Lee and Herman Melville. This was his public-facing media diet, but in his basement bedroom at his parents’ house, the volume turned low so they couldn’t hear, he watched The Howard Stern Show. He loved how Stern brought in his crew as characters and how their lives outside of the studio became content for the program.
“That was not something people did back then,” he said.
Jones played golf, tennis and (some) basketball at Middlesboro High. He also wrote up game stories about the other Yellowjacket teams for the Middlesboro Daily News, his first foray into media, but he was still eyeing a career in law as he left for college. A political science degree from Transylvania University was followed by law school at Duke University, where most of his classmates arrived from different worlds.
“A lot of them had lived in very cultured lives but had no perspective of what the rest of the country was like, and I felt like I did,” he said. “I learned that my accent could be an advantage because people would underestimate you.”
It was the early aughts, and blogging was coming into vogue. In the fall of 2005, while working a post-grad clerkship for Judge Karen Caldwell of the Eastern District of Kentucky, Jones started a blog of his own: Kentucky Sports Radio. Not yet on the radio, the name was aspirational. He continued to work on the site after accepting an associate position at the Louisville law firm Frost Brown Todd. The site continued to grow, and Jones transitioned away from practicing law. First, he left the firm and started his own practice. Not long after, he went all in on KSR.
• • •
In 2010, KSR launched as a daily radio show. It soon became a sensation, filling a void for Wildcats fans and Kentuckians who wanted a show about their team and their state. Like Stern, Jones has relied on a consistent cast of contributors since the beginning. He met Drew Franklin during their early blogging days. Producer Shannon Grigsby initially was assigned to the show by iHeart Radio in a sort of arranged marriage gone right. Ryan Lemond was a veteran of Kentucky sports media who first appeared on the show as a guest back in 2011. It was Kentucky Derby week, and, like Jones before the New Orleans Bowl, Lemond prepped hard for the episode. He memorized odds, read up on jockeys, and picked a winner.
“Not one time did we talk about the Kentucky Derby,” Lemond remembered. “That’s when I knew: OK, this is my kind of show.”
The show is purposefully seat-of-the pants. Each morning, Jones jots down a dozen topic ideas that he pulls from personal experience, Wildcat happenings and general news. None of the co-hosts is briefed on the items.
“A lot of the time, we haven’t even talked to each other before we turn on the show,” Franklin said. “We’ll walk in two minutes before, say, ‘Good morning,’ and then we’re just off and running, just having a conversation.”
KSR has become one of the most popular local sports shows in the country, and the dedicated clientele has given Jones a transferable customer base to carry into other pursuits. The national Sunday morning show he co-hosts with Medcalf on ESPN has had its own success. His book Mitch, Please, about longtime United States Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, was a bestseller. His restaurant, KSBar & Grille, is approaching eight years in business. Many of those close to Jones say he doesn’t take it for granted.
“I think Matt feels responsible for shaping the narrative about what Kentucky is, who the people are … I think he feels like every time he turns on a hot mic nationally, he has to say, ‘Wait a minute; I’m going to show you that this place isn’t maybe what you think, but I’m also not going to let you bash the people that I grew up with and who love and support me,’ ” Medcalf said.
• • •
Around dinnertime on an unseasonably warm December night in New Orleans, Jones and Medcalf exited the Superdome as victors. They had delivered, as agreed upon by both men and their bosses, a good call of WKU’s victory over Southern Miss. As a bonus, an influx of KSR fans lent a ratings boost.
Around them, a stream of red and gold-clad fans flowed into the night. Several people from the Hilltopper contingent recognized Jones as he and Medcalf walked down Poydras Street toward a nearby restaurant where, once inside and off their feet, they ordered gumbo, watched the house musician play the electric flute, and exhaled. It was, Jones said, a special moment. They had stuck the landing.