In retrospect, ‘College GameDay’ could have just kept doing mascot headgear picks

The lingering question heading into Saturday’s College GameDay in Norman, Oklahoma, was how ESPN’s college football stalwart would replace the iconic Lee Corso mascot headgear pick to close the show.

Occam’s razor suggested that they’d do it the way they’d been doing it in recent years when Corso was absent: Pat McAfee would do a WWE-style promo before eventually picking the home team.

That is indeed what happened.

That’s fine. It might get a little boring when McAfee keeps picking the home team each time (as he is wont to do), but it’ll do the job.

But it’s no headgear pick. In the parlance of professional wrestling, now that’s a gimmick. And any pro wrestling fan knows that you never give up on a gimmick while it’s still working.

The headgear pick is indeed synonymous with Lee Corso, who said goodbye to GameDay last week. And arguably the largest audience in the show’s history was on hand to watch him don a mascot head one last time.

Rece Davis confirmed what had long been reported, that the headgear pick retired along with Corso. But in retrospect, perhaps that was being a little too precious about something that works too well to stop doing now.

Much like the sport it covers, one of GameDay’s defining qualities is its traditions. Removing this one, the thing that anchors audiences in place before they ravenously start consuming college football games, feels like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

All due respect to Corso, who is a legend, but sometimes the best way to honor a legend is to maintain the thing that makes them so iconic.

If you’re worried about someone getting dinged for “replacing” Corso, you don’t even need to assign the tradition to a singular person. Let the guest picker be the one to do it each week. Make it a round-robin responsibility between McAfee, Herbstreit, and Desmond Howard (something tells us Nick Saban would politely decline). Fly in Chris Berman each week to do a five-minute segment that includes the headgear pick.

That last one is a bridge too far, but there’s a way to keep this tradition going without being overly precious about it.

Besides, there’s a decent chance that McAfee won’t be around for that long. And if he goes, Herbstreit might go. Nothing gold can stay. Therefore, it’s not the best idea to try to recreate the show-ending segment around a single person. You won’t be able to replicate someone like Lee Corso.

However, you can find a way to move forward without abandoning tradition (again, the parallels to college football itself are uncanny).