There is a topic college football fans and the media around the sport don’t want to talk about. We know that it is a conversation that has to be had sooner rather than later. If you love this sport, there is a soft spot in your heart for Lee Corso and it makes sense that you would want him to stay on College GameDay forever. The reality though is that the man just turned 86 and has already survived multiple health scares. The discussion of what comes next needs to happen sooner rather than later.
If ESPN brass is ready to have that conversation, even if just behind closed doors, this week, they got a gift from Louisiana State University. Plenty of names have been bandied about as the next potential former coach at the GameDay dais before. Ed Orgeron is the first guy since Steve Spurrier that struck me as an undeniably perfect fit.
LSU announced on Sunday that it was done with Orgeron less than two years after the man coached the Bayou Bengals to a national championship. When you read Brody Miller’s story for The Athletic about his increasingly erratic behavior since that title, it makes sense why it was a move that had to be made. It also is pretty clear that no college athletic director is going to be eager to tie their future to Ed Orgeron any time soon.
ESPN has been given a gift – the kind of gift that you don’t get very often. The network can take a damaged product with tremendous upside, refurbish it exactly as it needs, and ensure a bright future for one of its best-known studio franchises.
College football fans can just look at a picture of Ed Orgeron and hear his distinct “geaux tiguhs” in their head. People that aren’t college football fans are more likely to be able to identify the coach if you played a clip of his voice than if you showed them a picture of his face. He has been around the sport for a long time. He was the head coach of one of the very best teams ever assembled. For a guy whose time in the spotlight was brief, he got really close to icon status.
That is the kind of guy that ESPN is going to need when it is time to say goodbye to the Sunshine Scooter. Orgeron is fun, he’s got a big personality, and he has enough Louisiana in him to feel obligated to turn every room he is in into the center of the party.
I can hear your objections through the computer screen. “Demetri, one of the problems LSU had with the coach is his short, volatile temper. Won’t that be a problem for ESPN too?” Do you mean the same ESPN that hired Bobby Knight and Lou Holtz? No, something tells me that isn’t a dealbreaker. “But Demetri, what about the strange behavior around women? He has a sort of icky reputation right now.” True, but just because you hire him doesn’t mean you have to put him on TV right away. Plus, all of us in this business know stories or have heard rumors about well-known names and faces in the broadcast world that betray the family man reputation so many of them have cultivated. Grow up.
Ed Orgeron is absolutely damaged goods right now. But the reality of college sports is, at best, they are an amoral enterprise. No one ever got fired for being a creep. They got fired for being a creep that didn’t win.
Very few people that are objectionable right now remain untouchable forever. I have written before about Orgeron’s former boss Les Miles. He created a really toxic culture at LSU. He probably isn’t getting another shot to be on national TV, but as I have it isn’t because of the sexual harassment allegations against him. It is because he is awful on TV.
Time heals a lot, and on top of that, America loves a redemption story. Urban Meyer left Ohio State as an absolute pariah amongst college football fans outside the state of Ohio and walked immediately onto the set of FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff. The national narrative wasn’t about how anyone could give this guy another chance for very long. It was mostly “he’s a lot better on TV than I thought he’d be.”
That was Urban Meyer, who is as interesting as a bag of sticks. Imagine how ready to forgive and move on we will be when our redemption candidate is a pudgy man whose eyes disappear when he smiles and sounds like Cookie Monster! The guy said that when he got his $17 million buyout from LSU he was going to “buy a few Sonic cheeseburgers”. How can you not smile at something like that?
Even before he suffered his first stroke, Lee Corso’s strength has always been his charm. He absolutely knows football and is entertaining as hell when he is handed a mascot head or is given a gun to fire wildly above a crowd of 20-somethings. But what makes Lee so special on TV is that he always seems to be having so much damn fun!
Ed Orgeron can be that type of guy. No one is banging the door down to get Corso off the College GameDay set any time soon. No one is banging the door down to put Orgeron in charge of their football team. Take advantage of that. The guy has the natural gifts you cannot teach. ESPN can take a couple of years to work on his presence and presentation before thrusting him into the spotlight, and he could become the same kind of cornerstone for the network’s college football coverage that Corso has been for nearly 35 years.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
