Happy College Football Week Zero to those who celebrate- to honor the occasion, re-booting this classic once again from 2018, enjoy!
I absolutely loved ESPN College Gameday, about a decade and half ago when it was only one hour long, instead of three. Back in those days, it was not overrun with wall-to-wall native advertising, and it was much more about football than what’s it’s all about today- pop culture bubble gum nonsense.
This was long before the SEC broadcast rights deal, so it wasn’t just a SEC Network (sometimes also featuring Clemson, or whatever the elite program from another conference has to be at that particular time) preview show.
While every football preview show (honestly, all of them are just thinly veiled native advertising), on every network, will dumb you down, ESPN College Gameday goes well out of its way to serve its corporate overlords at every turn.
ESPN College Gameday used to not have sponsored content for the fan made signs, or for announcing the arrival of the guests, or the Xs and Os segments, and well, pretty much every single moment of every show.
The whole program is now basically one long infomercial and SEC propaganda fest, and that’s why it’s so heavily micro-managed by media handlers and spin masters.
That’s not just my opinion by the way, these are words spoken by ESPN PR staffers themselves. They have told me directly just how tightly controlled all video clips, from every segment, truly are.
They do however, want you to share it, if it’s a segment that ESPN wants to crow about, which brings us to the ESPN College Gameday seminal moment. Sadly, it’s the segment they’re most proud of, as they made it their Twitter banner photo. (Tells you everything you need to know about what the show really values as its identity)
It’s when the show officially jumped-the-shark for good:
Katy Perry, appearing in that memorably bizarre outfit, to guest pick at Ole Miss.
ESPN PR had no issues blasting out that clip on their distribution lists (basically spam, but for the media only), just so they could try and promote yet another “press release” about their own cherry-picked ratings numbers.
That’s really sad because it was truly the moment that the program stopped being about college football and instead shifted to whatever it takes to get the most eyeballs.
It was just like every cliche documentary about a band breaking up: “you’ve changed man, it used to be about the music.”
When ESPN College Gameday debuted it was ground-breaking. It was pure transcendence- an actual college football preview show that packed a lot of information, stats and cogent analysis into an action packed single hour.
Now its been overly-elongated and needlessly bloated up to three grueling hours, and most of it is mind-numbing filler material.
The decision to expand from one hour to two was misguided. The decision to then go from two hours to three was utterly absurd.
Today, it’s just a long infomercial for whatever school is hosting, spliced with:
Tom Rinaldi (before he left for another network) long form to make you depressed and cry, and fan signs that used to be more provocative and edgy (the best, or at least funniest, part of the show once upon a time) which are now watered down, so that no corporate sponsor gets offended.
And of course, segments about the show itself.
Yes, that might be the worst part of ESPN College Gameday and ESPN in general, the level of narcissism and self-importance that pervades this program and the network overall as a whole. ESPN loves itself some ESPN because it can’t stop talking about ESPN.
It’s Trump, in sports television programming form.
Of course, this soap box session may just fall on deaf ears, as the program remains extremely popular.
It’s always a top trending term on Twitter every autumn Saturday morning, even though it’s nothing but unwatchable corporate crapola.
Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager of The Bank (TheSportsBank.Net) and author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” as well as “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune, and he co-hosts the After Extra Time podcast, part of Edge of the Crowd Network. Follow him and the website on Twitter and Instagram.