The day all of us have been waiting for is finally here: the start of the college football season. But be honest. The season doesn’t feel like it’s really started until College GameDay airs for the first time. Beginning its 24th year of existence, GameDay has become just as big an event as the football game it visits. We take a look at how this once little-known show became the gold standard in college football coverage.
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BYU’s Ty Detmer Enjoying Life Back In Football Following Triton Scandal
After a disastrous stint in the corporate world, BYU’s Ty Detmer is finally back where he belongs: calling the shots on a football field.
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The Rise Of Virginia Tech And Boise State
Next Monday night the entire country will have its eyes on Landover, MD, when No. 3 Boise State squares off against No. 10 Virginia Tech. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when both programs were irrelevant – and Boise wasn’t even an FBS program. While Virginia Tech and Boise State have had different routes to this point, there have been a lot of similarities in their rise to prominence. We examine them.
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Run For The Roses: Arizona’s Quest To Finally Reach Pasadena For First Rose Bowl
In the history of the Rose Bowl, just one school between the Big Ten and Pac-10 has never smelled the roses: Arizona. With the conference so open this season, the Wildcats have a chance to snap their dubious drought. But be careful what you wish for. In their 32 years as a member of the Pac-10, the Wildcats have come painfully close to reaching the big stage only to fail each time. We look back on the school’s biggest heart breaks.
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Miami Hurricanes Before They Were “The U”
There are two things people associate with the University of Miami: winning and swagger. As in, lots of winning and tons of swagger. But there was a time when the Miami football team couldn’t crack .500 and was filled with preppy Southerners instead of future NFL stars. This was the era “before swagger” (B.S. for short), and we explore this period from 1968-78 when Miami was a college football bottom feeder.
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Ode To The Fumblerooski: Revisiting College Football’s Lost Play Not Seen In 18 Years
With all the gadget plays Boise State has pulled out of its bag of tricks the past couple years, there’s one gimmick we still haven’t seen in college football for almost two decades. In fact, the last time most people saw it was in the 1994 movie “Little Giants,” when it was known as the “Annexation of Puerto Rico” (the play was also in “The Longest Yard” remake, but who really saw that?).
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Chicago Maroons: The Rise And Fall Of College Football’s Lost “Monsters Of The Midway”
The casual college football fan has never heard of the University of Chicago Maroons. But any college football history buff could tell you that this Big Ten co-founder (yes, they were in the Big Ten) used to be a football powerhouse. So what happened to the 1905 national champions? 105 years later, we explore the history of football at the University of Chicago.
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College Football’s Top 20 FBS Super Fans
If the NFL is considered America’s new religion, then the college game is our nation’s biggest cult. The most rabid U.S. sports fans, millions of them fill stadiums across the country each fall Saturday and literally live and die college football.
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The Growth Of College Fantasy Football
The new reality for sports fandom is full of fantasy. Fantasy sports, that is. No longer satisfied with rooting for a team, fans are now growing allegiances to individual players and their statistics as the world of fantasy sports continues to grow. As fantasy sports began with the pros, it was only a matter of time before college sports entered the world. We look at the history and future of fantasy college football.
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It’s All About Stamina At LSU Tailgates
LSU super fan Marvin Dugas, a.k.a. “Big Ragoo,” talks about surviving 12-hour tailgates, going on the road to watch the Tigers, the key ingredient in Cajun food (beer) and his thoughts on Nick Saban now that he’s winning national championships for the enemy (run time is 3:05).
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Inside Larry Coker’s Crazy Last Decade
The last 10 years have been a wild ride for Larry Coker. He was on top of the college football world in just his first season as a head coach at “The U” in 2001. But as Coker discovered, when you begin at the very top, the only other place to go is down. As the former Miami coach restarts his career at a brand new program, we look at how he went to the top of college football at the beginning of the decade to an FCS start-up program by the end of it.
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Talking With The Legendary Mr. Two-Bits
Florida’s George Edmondson has been known at The Swamp as Mr. Two-Bits for over 60 years, recently retiring after the 2008 season. Edmondson talks about Steve Spurrier personally asking him to come back in 1998 and what’s it’s like to be so beloved at UF (run time is 4:03; transcript below the jump – Editor’s Note: podcast was edited to condense).
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