Sports Media Watch presents thoughts on recent events in the industry, starting with Lee Corso’s retirement announcement and why his generation of broadcasters will not be easily replaced.
Lee Corso’s announced retirement last week officially marks the end of an era for “College Gameday.” The show had been existing on two different timelines, with the Corso era heading to its conclusion and the Pat McAfee era just beginning. Now, following Week 1 of next season, McAfee will officially take the reins as the show’s colorful wild card.
That Corso remained on “Gameday” all the way into 2025 was no sure thing. Beyond the mere fact of his age, Corso suffered a stroke in 2009 that affected his speech. Nobody then could have imagined he would remain on the show for sixteen more years.
His longevity allowed “Gameday” a smooth transition to its new era. Last season, McAfee would open the show leading the boisterous crowd in some school-specific chant, usually standing on a chair. Corso would end it, as he has nearly every week of every season for nearly 30 years, putting on a mascot head and inciting either cheering or (rarely of late) boos.
Yet even amidst what has been a fairly smooth succession plan, make no mistake that the departure of Corso is the end of an era — and not just for “College Gameday.”
The Cable Guys
Corso and his generational peers — among them Dick Vitale and Bill Raftery, both of whom have also continued working into their 80s — are not just beloved, colorful, staples of sports on TV. They are, arguably, pioneers in the industry.
While sports broadcasting has been around for a century via the radio, and became established on television in the days of Roone Arledge-led ABC Sports in the 1960s, sports television as we have known it — a proliferation of games at all hours of the day and an attendant deluge of supplementary content — is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Yes, the pregame show dates back to before the days of cable — “The NFL Today” inaugurated the format in 1975, having originally debuted under a different name and format a decade earlier — and there were colorful analysts in those days as well, including Al McGuire on college basketball. Nevertheless, sports television was not truly sports television until the beginning of the 24-hour era that dawned with ESPN’s 1979 launch, still less than 50 years ago.
Thus, the generation of Corso, Vitale and Raftery — all of whom began their national broadcasting careers with ESPN — really dates back to the beginning of sports television in its familiar form. Their careers coincided with an explosion of sports content, particularly in the college space, where a 1984 Supreme Court decision opened the door to college sports becoming a television staple.
When “College Gameday” launched in 1987, it was only three years after the Supreme Court decision that eliminated NCAA caps on schools’ television appearances and led to the now-familiar tonnage of college football on TV. The show’s first campus visit occurred within a decade of that ruling. Corso’s first headgear pick, at Ohio State in 1996, took place a mere 12 years after. If all of it seemed new, even revolutionary, that is because it was.
What is next?
It is simply impossible for the likes of McAfee to fill those shoes, as to replicate Corso’s impact on college football television coverage would be akin to inventing a new wheel. The college football pregame format, which largely did not exist when Corso began his career, has been perfected. That is not to say that “Gameday” in its current form is flawless or the best it has ever been, but that the format is set in stone. When Fox set about competing with “Gameday,” it did so by mimicking the show even more closely than “Mad TV” once did “Saturday Night Live.”
In essence, trying to replace Corso would be like trying to create a new “Dan and Keith” on SportsCenter. The time when that could have been done has long past. Now anything similar will be too influenced by what came before to qualify as new.
Longevity has prevented any number of uncomfortable conversations in recent years. Did anyone think in 2000 that Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley would still be working together on the same show a quarter-century later? When “Pardon the Interruption” started the following year, could anyone have sold Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon on the idea that it would still be on in 24 years?
These tenures, which have spanned multiple eras of American life, have allowed the networks to avoid thinking about what’s next. Indeed, ‘what’s next’ is often more of the same. TNT is losing the NBA, but Johnson, Smith and Barkley are set to be more ubiquitous than ever next season, working big NBA games for ESPN/ABC (including the NBA Finals) and presumably continuing in their NCAA men’s basketball tournament roles. With the cancellation of “Around the Horn,” ESPN has reportedly given thought to expanding “PTI” to a full hour.
At a certain point, stability changes into something closer to stagnancy, perhaps even fear of change. One could look at the sports media hot stove in recent years and question that assessment, but this is not merely about who works where. The industry has reached the stage of endlessly replicating success stories instead of creating new ones, which may be more of an inevitability than a failing. In 2025, it is just impossible to break new ground with a college football pregame show, an NBA recap show or a daily debate program.
One could look toward McAfee as the direction in which the industry may be headed. He is culturally aligned with online media, which younger viewers consume in far greater fashion than linear television. (His weekly kicking contest on “Gameday” may as well be a recurring YouTube feature; all it is missing is a thumbnail of him making an exaggerated expression.) The informal format of his daily show has proven a comfortable, podcast-esque space for even some of the biggest stars in sports — LeBron James most recently — to speak in a manner far more frank than that of late-night TV or traditional interviews.
Yet one hesitates to give McAfee — or online media generally — too much credit for reinventing the wheel. Podcasts and YouTube are themselves influenced by television. If they are the future of sports TV, or television generally, the industry will essentially take the form of a snake eating its own tail.
It may be the case that it is impossible to replicate the creative energy of the past in an era where there is so much content that virtually everything has been done. Perhaps it is simply true that the voices of the Corso generation — the earliest stars of sports television’s cable era — are irreplaceable.
In that case, enjoy their presence on your television screens while you can. In the case of Corso, that means one final chance at the end of August.
Pass the remote
The issue of remote broadcasts surfaced again over the weekend, as TNT Sports did not send its game announcers to the Blues-Jets Stanley Cup playoff game in Winnipeg — the first game of the postseason. It was not a first offense for TNT, which did the same during last year’s postseason. As previously argued on this site, remote broadcasts signal to the viewer that the network did not deem an event important enough to provide the best possible coverage.
The issue is not necessarily one of audio quality. In fact, one could argue that ESPN’s Sunday telecast of Senators-Maple Leafs, with announcers on-site, sounded just as ‘off’ — or even worse. Nevertheless, even in those cases where the differences between a remote and on-site broadcast are negigible, there is just no substitute for the announcers actually ‘being there.’
Keep an eye on the trend toward remote broadcasts. In addition to TNT’s Stanley Cup playoff game, CW yet again had its announcers remote for NASCAR from Rockingham on Saturday. That would be two relatively high-profile sporting events, both in or around the seven-figure viewership mark, where announcers were working remotely.
NBA playoff thoughts
The term of the weekend in the NBA Playoffs was “striking distance,” as in ‘if team X can just get to within striking distance,” the game may actually become competititve. Seven of eight playoff series openers were decided by double-digits, and in five of those games, the biggest leads were by blowout margins: Oklahoma City by 56, Indiana by 28, Minnesota by 27, Golden State by 23, Cleveland by 21, Boston by 19. (The Clippers also led by 15 — in a game they would eventually lose — and the Knicks by 13.)
Matchups and even ratings are not as important as game quality. Given the Easter Sunday holiday and attendant bump in out-of-home viewing, it is likely that the opening weekend ratings story will be positive. Those good feelings will be short-lived if the games do not improve.
ESPN’s Jay Bilas made his NBA playoff debut Saturday night and was characteristcally solid, but his performance was not quite what one would expect for the occasion.
Perhaps some of that is due to the atmosphere at Crypto.com Arena, which with the Lakers blowout defeat seemed — at least through the television — to live up to the first five letters of its name. Some can also be atttributed to Bilas’ style, which has never been prone to ballyhoo. It may even be the case that the NBA is still an adjustment for him and not necessarily his strength.
Regardless of the reason, he was a bit more sedate than one might typically want for a featured, primetime playoff game on broadcast television. Bilas will have more opportunities to show a bit more enthusiasm as the postseason moves along.
Following the last opening playoff weekend of the NBA’s current media rights deal, one might wonder what the schedule will look like under the new agreement that begins next season. The NBA will have three mouths to feed between ESPN/ABC, NBC/Peacock and Prime Video.
With Prime carrying the entire NBA Play-In Tournament — a fact many fans seemed unaware of when this writer brought it up on social media Friday — it might make sense for it to skip the opening weekend. (It is unclear whether Prime will even have enough NBA crews to handle six Play-In games plus the opening weekend in a six-day span.) ESPN/ABC produced a whopping seven play-in and playoff telecasts between Friday and Sunday, a heavy lift that makes one think the network might scale back to four or five next year.
One suggestion for next year’s opening weekend: an even split with NBC/Peacock carrying doubleheaders on Saturday afternoon and Sunday night, while ESPN/ABC gets doubleheaders on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. (Of course the ideal nostalgia play would be to give NBC a tripleheader on one of those two days.)
