Thursday marked the beginning of a long goodbye.
Lee Corso isn’t quite done yet. But the end is in sight.
ESPN announced that Corso will officially retire from College GameDay following Week 1 of the 2025 season. He’ll get one final fall sendoff, one more shot at the headgear routine that’s become as much a part of college football Saturdays as kickoff itself. The network now faces some tough decisions, like whether to continue the tradition he made iconic or let it retire with him. And perhaps even tougher — where to host his final GameDay appearance.
Already bracing for change, the sports world began paying tribute to one of the sport’s most cherished voices.
As did Scott Van Pelt.
“For nearly 30 years, no matter where you were on a given Saturday in the fall, if you loved college football, you had one duty, not an obligation, but a place you had to be just before noon eastern: in front of your television to see who Lee’s going to pick,” Van Pelt said on Thursday’s SportsCenter. “If you think about it in this time of DVRs, that moment became the last thing you truly had to see live as it happened, because it’s magic, it’s electric. And watching it later would’ve been like, I don’t know, cheating somehow.
“Stripped to its essence, it’s a man putting on a muppet head, right? No, that’s not it at all. It was Coach — the man who gracefully aged into becoming everyone’s dad, then grandpa, and beloved friend. You wanted him to pick your team, of course, but you know somehow it was even more fun when he reeled you in and then he went heel, watching it with tens of thousands of fans behind the set sitting in the palm of his hand — there was nothing like it. And there’s nothing like him either. He is singular.”
There’s no replacing him, which is why Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder argued that they shouldn’t.
“Lee Corso is an absolute icon and star, who will say his farewell to an adoring legion of fans at the end of August as the college football season kicks off,” said Van Pelt. “From all corners, Thursday, as this news became public, you felt an avalanche of love on social media, and that’s a place where that can be awfully hard, if not impossible, to find. But Lee melts away cynicism with the warmth of who he has been to the viewer for decades, and that love is real.
“Having been lucky enough to be a very small part of the show for a bit more than a decade ago, I can tell you that the love of the GameDay family is even stronger. And Coach, of course, has always been the patriarch. You see the true affection reflected today from all who have worked with him, like Chris Fowler and Rece Davis, the brilliant hosts who have helped him truly shine. Folks like David Pollack, Desmond Howard, Pat McAfee, The Bear (Chris Fallica), Stanford Steve, the folks he has shared the set with and collaborated, them too, but the relationship I’ve treasured watching is Coach and Herbie. The sincerity. The tenderness and the care and the appreciation that each has for the other, which has grown more obvious as time has gone on.”
And that’s what time does. It goes on.
“I think of the old Bob Seger line, ’30 years, where’d they go? 30 years. I don’t know. I sit and I wonder sometimes where they’ve gone.’ But GameDay’s gone all over the country on a joyride,” Van Pelt adds. “And, Lee, you have made it a blast. We celebrate one last ride. The place you occupy and the hearts of college football fans will never belong to anyone else.”
There will be one more pick. One more mascot head. One more Saturday morning where fans across the country pause, not just to see who Lee Corso chooses, but to say thank you.
Thank you for the laughs. The chaos. The curveballs. The heart.
The man who brought so much joy to college football will take his final bow this fall. And if anyone captured what that means, it was Scott Van Pelt’s diatribe on Thursday’s SportsCenter.