The ESPN and SEC Network college football studio crews are about to pull an impressive back-to-back.
Both College GameDay and SEC Nation will conduct live on-site shows on Friday night for Alabama-Oklahoma in Norman, OK, before hitting the road to be ready for Miami-Texas A&M in College Station, TX, on Saturday morning. Last year, GameDay did a similarly quick turnaround, packing up shop from South Bend, IN, after Notre Dame’s first-round game on Friday night and heading straight for Columbus, OH, to gear up for a 9 a.m. show at Ohio State.
The SEC Network took a different approach last season, sending different studio shows on-site to cover different games. This year, it will all fall on the SEC Nation crew. Laura Rutledge will host alongside analysts Jordan Rodgers, Tim Tebow, and Roman Harper. The crew will also anchor the halftime show for ABC’s broadcast of Alabama-Oklahoma. On Saturday, they’ll handle halftime, but only for the SEC Network’s Skycast presentation, per ESPN’s announcement on Monday.
It goes without saying, but producing two live shows in two different states with such a short turnaround is a massive undertaking. The drive from Norman to College Station is between five and six hours, and ESPN will almost certainly need to transport some production equipment from one site to the other overnight. That’s a very tight timeline, especially for the SEC Network show, which will be handling postgame duties late Friday night into early Saturday morning.
GameDay should have a slightly easier time, as it will go off the air at 8 p.m., leading into Friday’s game and won’t be back live until 9 a.m. Saturday morning. But GameDay is a much bigger production than SEC Nation. The set is more elaborate, and ESPN might not have duplicates of everything necessary to fully prepare for the show ahead of time. The SEC Network show won’t go live until 10 a.m. on Saturday, giving Rutledge and Co. an extra hour to recoup from a late Friday night.
When the average viewer tunes into either show this weekend, they might not notice everything that goes on behind the scenes to make this possible. But no doubt, ESPN knows it has its work cut out for it this week with such a tight schedule.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.