College football will officially return at about 11:53 a.m. Saturday. That’s when an 86-year-old man will put on a mascot head. Lee Corso will be back. For at least one crazy moment, all will be right with the world.“It’s about time,” he said. Corso, of course, is the man beneath the mascot heads. He’s been at it for three decades on ESPN’s “College GameDay,” capping that morning’s festivities by putting on a Trojan helmet or Gator head or some other apparatus to predict that day’s winner. The show has become an event unto itself. If ESPN builds a “GameDay” set near your stadium, you are the center of the college football universe. This week’s center is Atlanta, where Alcorn State will play North Carolina Central. It’s billed as “Week 0,” ESPN’s annual nod to schools that don’t get much spotlight. Week 1 will be Charlotte, and the Clemson-Georgia showdown. Week 3 will probably be in Gainesville, when Alabama comes to town. Delta surge willing, Corso will be there.“The first two weeks of the season, we’ll definitely be on the road,” he said. “After that, I might have to reconsider depending on conditions.”Consider that another reason to pray the pandemic lightens up. It sapped the life out of last season. Games went on, but they lacked fans, enthusiasm, pomp, circumstance and delightfulness. Corso is all those things in one irrepressible package. But in pre-vaccine 2020, it was too risky for that package to hit the road.“GameDay” carried on, playing to empty parking lots while Corso hunkered down in his Orlando home. It was like a weekly family reunion without everyone’s favorite uncle. ESPN did its best to incorporate Corso into the proceedings. It built crazy sets, like a winter wonderland for him to play Santa Claus. Then there was the 17-foot elephant statue Corso climbed to predict the Alabama-Georgia winner.“I had to get permission from the HOA for that one,” Corso laughed. The Zoom approach was entertaining, but it wasn’t the same.“Nothing beats the enthusiasm you get from the crowd,” Corso said. That cuts both ways. The mere appearance of Uncle Lee on “GameDay” fuels the crowd, and that reaction fuels Corso.“The Sunshine Scooter” is a born showman. That was Corso’s nickname at Florida State, where he was Burt Reynolds’ roommate and a two-way star on the football team. Corso was a good coach with a great sense of humor. He needed both traits to survive 10 years at Indiana. After a bad loss one week, Corso opened his TV show by rising from a casket and saying, “We ain’t dead yet!”Hard to imagine Nick Saban ever doing that. Fate had bigger things than coaching in mind for Corso. After the USFL Orlando Renegades folded in 1986, he caught on with ESPN. The rest is broadcast history featuring hundreds of mascot headpieces and trademark phrases like “Hello!” and “Not so fast, my friend.” But history will not adequately record how hard Corso worked to make it happen. A stroke in May 2009 left him unable to speak or even swallow.
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