This started as a very different blog post.
In all the early speculation about “College GameDay could come to Ames!” — see here, and here, and here — I was certain that there was no way it could possibly happen.
I was wrong. It just required a massive confluence of events.
- Weeks 2/3 can be a desert in terms of college football programming, even below SEC Cupcake Week. The high-profile non-conference matchups happen early, and conference games are scattered at best. Iowa-Iowa State (no, not the name certain corners of the Internet want to give it) is the only regular non-conference series of note in the Big Ten.
- ABC’s Saturday night game is Clemson at Syracuse, a conference game, and ESPN play-by-play announcer and Syracuse alumnus Sean McDonough will be calling it. But Syracuse got trucked by Maryland. ESPN’s night game is Florida-Kentucky (always has to be early in the year because Gators can’t stand the cold), and Kentucky hasn’t beaten Florida at home in more than 30 years.
- Another potential GameDay matchup, Stanford at UCF, would fit the “offbeat” game profile, but ESPN had already cashed its Orlando chip at Disney World for Week 0 and Stanford’s game against USC was so late that when a decision had to be made, it wasn’t known if Stanford would be a ranked team next week.
- Because this year’s schedule has an extra week and idle Week 2’s are stupid, Iowa State didn’t have any new data point after beating a I-AA team in triple overtime while Nebraska blew a 17-point halftime lead in front of a home crowd at Folsom Field. (You read that correctly.)
The research I did is still good, but the conclusion has to be modified to take into account new data. So, rather than how “GameDay” was never coming to Ames, here’s just how unlikely it had to be.
Of all the college football fan bases out there, Iowa State’s should be one of the most understanding of a 21st-century sports maxim: ESPN programming exists to support “the ESPN family of networks.” That also means talking about the College Football Playoff, and when not talking about the College Football Playoff, asking, “What about this team that might make the College Football Playoff?” (This guy gets it.)
With the help of the NCAA’s list of College GameDay sites crossed with lsufootball.net’s comprehensive TV schedule archive (in God’s Own Time Zone, of course), I set to work compiling a spreadsheet of every GameDay site, matchup, and network in the 2010s.
Statistics are for nine years, 2010-18.
- Of 161 GameDay events, 12 were stunt GameDays with non-power-conference teams (two were actually non-games, Times Square and the NFL Draft), 33 were conference championship games or BCS/CFP games, and five were Army-Navy. So we’re down to 111 data points.
- 78 of those 111 games had a top-five team playing, and 18 more had a top-ten team playing.
- 64 were on ABC or ESPN at 6 PM or later.
Iowa State has never ever played Saturday night on ABC or ESPN in the modern television era.ISU played Nebraska in 2006 on Saturday night on ABC to a not-quite national audience — the only such game until 2020. - 33 were non-ESPN family — but 14 of them were the CBS SEC Game of the Week and six more were LSU-Alabama CBS night games. So, really, we’re talking about 13 games ESPN had to make an extra effort for. THIRTEEN.
- GameDay went to one game where both teams were unranked: 9/10/11, Notre Dame at Michigan, on ESPN. Those 13 games in the above bullet point? Two of them are the Irish, and Iowa State will never play Notre Dame (unless in a bowl).
The complete list of “College GameDay” power-conference games, 2010-present, not on the ESPN family of networks not involving a top-10 team:
- 10/12/13, #12 Oregon beats #16 Washington, 3 PM on FS1
- 9/24/16, #14 Tennessee beats #19 Florida, 2:30 PM on CBS
- 10/20/18, #25 Washington State beats #12 Oregon, 6:30 PM on Fox (the culmination of a 15-year campaign to get GameDay to come to Pullman)
- 9/1/18, #12 Notre Dame beats #14 Michigan, 6:30 PM on NBC
- 9/14/19, #20 Iowa at unranked Iowa State, 3 PM on FS1
Congratulations, “College ‘Ames’ Day.” See if Jim Walden is bringing the Washington State flag.
CORRECTION 9/27/20: One game has been on ABC prime-time this century. It has been noted above.