ESPN College GameDay is in the midst of its 30th college football season traveling to campuses across the country and presenting invigorating live pregame shows that prepare viewers for the day of college football. Featuring host Rece Davis and analysts Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard, and Pat McAfee, the program has become a staple for sports fans on a weekly basis and recently drew a record-breaking crowd of 26,000 people at James Madison University.
The program’s first roadshow took place in 1993 from South Bend when the Florida State Seminoles faced the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. About 2,000 fans surrounded the set within the Ed Joyce Center, cheering for their team, and started what has become a weekly tradition that anchors coverage of the sport in the mornings.
Chris Fowler hosted College GameDay until 2014 and has fond memories of hosting a live, in-person studio program in front of large crowds of zealous fans on a weekly basis. In a recent appearance on The Dan Patrick Show, Fowler reflected on what it means to have the show go on the road for three decades and how it has shaped the sports media space.
“We had been lobbying to get the show on the road for a while in the regular season; nobody really wanted to spend the money,” Fowler said. “That matchup kind of justified it, and it was pretty cool. We didn’t know what we were doing out there in South Bend, but we stumbled on it and we got through it. It was the birth.”
Show host Dan Patrick previously worked at ESPN as a SportsCenter anchor and was curious to discover when Fowler recognized that taking College GameDay on the road each week would end up paying dividends. Although the program had previously traveled for bowl games, it differed from what it was like to do a show live on a college campus. In fact, on the first night when the commentators were at the University of Notre Dame, Fowler remembers Corso telling him that he wanted to change his pick because of the energy at the pep rally.
“They really stumbled in not knowing what they were seeing,” Fowler said of visitors inside the university’s Hall of Fame, “a game that didn’t have a very high profile back then, but still you could tell that once the game was over, they all spilled back in there to celebrate. [Lou] Holtz storms out of his office up on the set and just arrives unannounced, and sits down and takes a victory lap. We knew at that point to be there on a campus for these big games was going to be something. We also knew we had a lot to learn [with] how to stage it.”
30 years? Gameday is getting kinda long in the tooth, and it’s starting to show.