At one point, I owned a a t-shirt with the ESPN logo on it, a pint glass with the ESPN logo on it and a pair of boxer shorts with various Stuart Scott catchphrases scrawled all over them.
It was the 90s. The heyday of ESPN. The Disney theme parks were experiencing a renaissance. The company’s animation studio had released some of its most iconic hits. Nothing was generating cash for the company at that time the way ESPN was.
On August 30, 2025, we officially bury the 90s at ESPN.
No, this column is not 26 years too late. It is a testament to what Lee Corso represents to the network. His final appearance on College GameDay will be a marquee moment – not just for the show or the network, but for cable television as a whole.
Think about the ESPN of 2025 and compare it to the 90s. Some of the biggest institutions of that time – SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight – are shells of their former selves. Other network backbones like Outside the Lines and NFL Primetime don’t exist at all anymore. First Take and The Pat McAfee Show were not even glimmers in anyone’s eyes at that point.
College GameDay is a show with no peers at the network. It’s the only show currently on ESPN that has enjoyed its current stature for thirty years.
It’s a show with few peers across television. Maybe only Inside the NBA can affect the sport it covers the way College GameDay can affect the one it does.
None of that would be possible without Lee Corso.
Corso’s Not Done Until Corso Says So
So much has been written about Corso in recent years, wondering why he has insisted on still being on television. Clearly he has lost a few steps as a result of the various health complications that began with his 2009 stroke, but some of the commentary has, frankly, been meanspirited. Even at this very site, we didn’t celebrate Corso. The day after his announcement, we ran a piece wondering what took so damn long. I’ll own that I have been guilty of clock watching with him. During this past college football season, I predicted that Corso would announce his retirement when the show visited Indiana in October.
Maybe it’s all just part of what comes with the territory when you are a regular TV presence while staring down the barrel of your ninth decade on Earth.
Whatever the case, the producers of College GameDay have been clear. Only Lee Corso gets to say when Lee Corso is done. It’s a fair position to take. Afterall, without him, GameDay is just another faceless pregame show. It probably never even leaves the studio to become the iconic road production it has been since 1995.
What Does Lee Corso Mean to ESPN?
Before Lee Corso, there weren’t a lot of people that acknowledged that college football culture was a little bit silly. There certainly weren’t people on TV that took the position that that silliness was a part of what was worth celebrating.
Corso, who played running back at Florida State before becoming a head coach at Louisville and Indiana, was not coy about his feelings. This is a game. The players and coaches have to take it seriously. The rest of us are allowed to have fun.
That attitude helped GameDay become what it is today. It was a point of differentiation from the rest of the media covering the sport and it showed that ESPN had the ammo to keep the guys that were entertained by the “Big Show” era of SportsCenter entertained around the clock.
‘Gimme That Head’
He created a signature moment for ESPN on October 5, 1996, when he announced that he was picking the number three Ohio State Buckeyes to beat fourth-ranked Penn State by putting on the head of Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye.
Say what you want about Inside the NBA or FOX NFL Sunday. Neither of them have a segment that has endured the way Corso’s “headgear pick” has. He has come up with new riffs on it to up the ante, including dressing as one of America’s Founding Fathers, riding on the back of the Oregon Duck’s motorcycle, and admitting that he didn’t realize how hard it would be to get a live baby elephant to be a part of picking Alabama to upset top-ranked Mississippi State in 2014. And who could forget the most iconic f-bomb in ESPN history?
There’s a reason the ESPN app sends out an alert right before the picks segment on College GameDay begins and why right after Corso yells “gimme that head” the video hits social media and gets pushed again by the app! There is no radio bit, no First Take debate, no anything that can compete with that.
No one will say Corso was keeping something that has happened across all of cable television from happening to ESPN. It may be the network that was hit the very hardest by cord cutting. I don’t know if ESPN will be a financial success as a stand alone streaming product, but it’s the only network with a name and properties valuable enough to even try.
ESPN isn’t alone in this boat. Any cache the name of a TV network or radio station holds is the result of the moments their talent have created on air. Corso is responsible for creating a lot of those moments for ESPN. They weren’t just the ones he was at the center of, either.
College GameDay After Lee Corso
Whether you know it or not, if you watched College GameDay, you owe Lee Corso a big thank you. TV is disposable unless a unique character changes that. Corso’s approach to broadcasting and his fearlessness made him standout and that made College GameDay standout.
Without him, there is a ripple effect in sports television that is too long to dive into right now, but suffice it to say that more than just college football and more than just ESPN would look different.
College GameDay host Rece Davis has made it clear. He doesn’t want to see someone else try to keep the headgear segment alive. It should retire with Corso.
I’ll go a step further. Do not add another cast member to College GameDay when he goes. The show already feels a little bit bloated, but also what would adding one more guy do? In the last three years, the show has added Pat McAfee and Nick Saban.
What better tribute to Corso than the reality that it takes two uniquely qualified men to make up for what ESPN will lose with the exit of just one Lee Corso?
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Demetri Ravanos is a former columnist and editor for Barrett Media. He is the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host of 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.
