Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [235]
What started as a small following on the campuses began to grow. By the end of the decade, the GameDay screen was now regularly filled with hordes of students waving banners, hoisting placards, and displaying painted faces in orgies of youthful bravado. Hosts Lee Corso, Chris Fowler, and Kirk Herbstreit made for an unbeatable trio, utterly at ease in their respective roles, each among the best at what he did.
Herbstreit was especially impressive for having made the transition from player to performer. The former Ohio State star’s analysis and delivery were accomplished, as if he’d been doing it for years; his telegenic looks didn’t hurt, either. Corso, despite being old enough to be the students’ grandfather, evinced an effortless affinity for relating to them. And Fowler showed himself to be a great student of the game, always prepared, verbally agile, and not at all interested in making the show about himself.
The show became a demonstration of what fandom is, of easy interaction between ESPN’s pros and the mobs of supportive students, and of how narrow a gap separated ESPN from its audience—probably the narrowest of any big-time commercial network, ever.
BILL CREASY:
We had it in the studio, but I kept saying, “Take it out on the road.” But in those early years, that would have been just too much money. I did believe from day one, though, that it would be a huge hit inside the college dorms. College dorms and bars may not be rated by Nielsen, so I have always believed that our audience was much bigger.
LEE CORSO:
This show is about the passion we have for college game days, and it’s about the passion of the crowds. They tried it with the NFL, they couldn’t get it. They tried it with basketball, they couldn’t get it. They can’t get nothing. The passion of college football is what makes College GameDay great.
BEANO COOK:
I was at College GameDay for the first four years, until my mother got ill. College football had never seen anything like it. The NFL had their great pregame shows, but nothing before had ever promoted college football like GameDay.
When Miami and Notre Dame played each other and they were both undefeated, I predicted Notre Dame would win. Tim Brando said he would sing the Notre Dame victory march on the air if I was right, and sure enough, they won and he did.
CHRIS FOWLER:
We took it on the road for our first regular season game in ’93, late in the season. It was this Notre Dame–Florida State mega showdown—one versus two in South Bend in November. Notre Dame’s larger than life, and we didn’t really know what we were doing, but Creasy and others took a big leap of faith. We had been wanting to do it for a while, and we finally got the game that justified it. Technically the show was probably raw and somewhat inept, but we knew we had something. And it just took one show to figure out “this is what we’ve got to be doing. We’ve got to get this thing out of the studio, onto campuses.” The next year we did about five or six, and the next year we did more.
Back in the early days, we didn’t feel like the West Coast was ever respected. We had a hell of a hard time getting a show out of the eastern and central time zones and bringing it to the West Coast. But we didn’t think people would show up that early in the morning at places that were not considered traditional hotbeds.
KIRK HERBSTREIT, College Football Analyst:
In ’95 I did a number of games with Dewayne Staats and Todd Christensen and I kept asking Moe [Davenport] if there was going to be a game where I could do color, because I really wanted to do that. Sure enough, there was an opening late in the year, Wisconsin versus Minnesota, and I called the game with Gary