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By Root 2436 0

Thorne. I was just blown away by having this chance. I’d never even called a high school game, and here I am calling a game in a sold-out Metrodome. And I fell in love with it. Once the season ended, I got another call from Moe, saying that Craig James had left and he went to CBS. He said, “We’d love for you to come in and audition for the spot on College GameDay.” And I remember his quote very well. He said, “You’re not going to get the job, but it’d be really good for you at this stage of your career to just go through the experience of being up on the set with Lee and Chris, and this will give you a little experience with an audience.” So here I am, three years out of college, fresh into the business, and this was my kind of ten-year dream goal. Lo and behold, they flew me in, and I’m sitting next to Chris and Lee and the music starts up, and I was just, “Somebody pinch me. I cannot believe I’m sitting next to Corso right now.” We did a fake segment, and then went through another segment and that was it. I thought it went okay, but I didn’t have any expectations. A few months went by, and I got a call from my agent who said, “They want to hire you for College GameDay.” It was incredible.

CHRIS FOWLER:

The crowds in ’99 were kind of a turning point for College GameDay. That’s when we realized that it was more than just popping a set down where tailgating was going on, and that it had become a real campus happening. The campuses were taking great pride in using the show as a vehicle to showcase their game-day spirit, what they felt about their program. They were there to show the world that there’s no place better on a Saturday, no place has more spirit and passion about their team than Virginia Tech or Nebraska or places like Kansas State. They began to see it as a benchmark for their program: “We made it when GameDay was here.”

The passions about college football are different than almost every other sport. Unless you’re talking about the Red Sox and Yankees, or a few other isolated rivalries in other sports, I would submit that the passions run deeper, people take it much more personally.

As the crowds grew, the disparity between what you see on camera and what’s happened before the show increased, particularly the confiscation of signs. A lot of the stuff is completely inappropriate. We started to have sign police out there. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the First Amendment, but some of the stuff is both tasteless and profane.

LEE CORSO:

In 1999, I ended up picking the correct winner in twelve straight games with my head, twelve straight games. It put a lot of pressure on me. Then I had sixteen straight. That will never happen again, I promise you. Can you believe I had sixteen straight games that I could have bet on?

CHRIS FOWLER:

I’m opening doors back up here that have been closed for a long time. It was 1998. In the weeks leading up to the Heisman announcement, when we talked about it on GameDay, I would just point out that if you read the tea leaves, it was not going to be a slam dunk for Peyton Manning, which you were hearing a lot of ahead of time. People assumed Peyton Manning had the Heisman won. All I said was that this wasn’t a done deal. I wasn’t trying to hype Charles Woodson or the show for that matter. The show was going to rate what it rated. I was just doing my job. But there were people at Tennessee who were frustrated and took it very personally. ESPN didn’t have the SEC games at that point, didn’t have as much of a relationship with the conference as we do now. We were seen as “the Big Ten Conference” by some people in that part of the world, and we were perceived to have an agenda.

I hosted the Heisman show and did the presentation. So I go on the air and introduce the winner, Charles Woodson. I’m the one there when he gets handed the trophy, and I’m on the scene when Peyton Manning and his family are deeply disappointed. Immediately, the story wasn’t that Charles Woodson won the Heisman; the story was that Peyton Manning didn’t win it. And I was the guy that was seen giving it to Woodson.