Remember when you were a little kid, and your favorite thing to do on Saturday was to wake up early and watch Saturday morning cartoons while eating your breakfast? Well, for college football fans, this beloved childhood pastime still holds true. The only difference is that the cartoons on Nickelodeon have been replaced with "College Gameday" on ESPN, and we can only do it during the fall and winter. Alas, college football has returned from the dormant state it has assumed for the last eight months or so. Consequently, the revival of "College Gameday" for the season is also upon us, and college football fans are excited about that, to say the least.
There's something more to the show that makes it great than simply watching the hosts go on the air and analyze the day's upcoming college football games for three hours. Sure, everybody wants to hear the experts go around the table and make predictions for the result of each contest, listening intently when their favorite team's game is being discussed. Everybody wants to hear Lee Corso's yells of "Not so fast!" when he disagrees with a prediction from the show's guest. And let's be honest, is there anybody in the world who doesn't enjoy Corso's weekly headgear pick for the game of the week?
On top of all that, though, the program shows the raw, unabated passion and pride that comes with being a diehard college football fan, which is probably the most coveted aspect of the Saturday morning pregame feel.
"Gameday," broadcast live onsite at the nation's most anticipated game of the week, isn't all about the experts at all. In fact, the show revolves mainly around the fans. More specifically, the show revolves around the fans packed into the surrounding areas of the set like sardines. These fans, most of them students from the university hosting the game of the week, scream cheers of excitement for their team and school on the air to let the country know that they are the loudest, most devout fan base in America.
To add to the spectacle, many of the fans in attendance sport their own self-produced signs as a platform of derision towards the opposing team. For example, this past Saturday, "Gameday" was in East Lansing, Michigan on the campus of Michigan State for the Michigan State vs. Oregon prime-time matchup, and one clever fan had a sign that donned Oregon's "O" logo as the lead character in the word "Overrated." Of course, the creative aspect of the signs can also get a bit out of hand, like when the "Kanye for President 2020" signs pop up on your screen.
As if the aforementioned features don't grease you up enough to watch college football all day long, "Gameday" also makes a point to show a good deal of short features relating to the players or coaches in the games they discuss. These features are feel-good stories for the fans to sink their teeth into before the action starts for the day. The features usually last about five to seven minutes in length, and range in topic from a former homeless player's journey from homelessness to stardom in college football, to a head coach spreading American college football's influence to Japan by becoming pen pals with a Japanese football coach. That's usually a recipe to touch your emotions and get you ready for a day filled with passionate college football.
Whether your team wins or loses, you will undoubtedly tune into "Gameday" next week to do it all over again. It doesn't matter that you don't care about the week's highlight game, it's all about the spectacle of college football and that butterfly-like feeling we get when we see the passion involved in it. Also, it's just pretty darn cool to act like a kid again and relive the feeling of waking up early for Saturday morning cartoons. Whatever the case may be, I would not recommend a Saturday morning hangover during college football season.
It's Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m., and "College Gameday" starts in 30 minutes. Get up, it's Gameday!
