ESPN College GameDay is headed to Times Square in New York City, for some reason
College GameDay, ESPN’s prestigious college football pregame show, is headed to an unlikely location for Week 4: Times Square in New York City.
Well, we didn’t see this one coming.
College GameDay, ESPN’s weekly college football road show has been travelling to the game’s biggest venues for a quarter century. South Bend, Tuscaloosa, The Horseshoe and the Big House are among the most common annual stops for the show, but the decision makers at ESPN also like to change things up with trips to lesser known locales as well. New venues also help keep the show fresh.
Back in July, we predicted the location for every edition of ESPN’s College GameDay for the 2017 college football season. With some big games on the slate for Week 4, including what will likely be a Top 25 matchup between Oklahoma State and TCU in Stillwater among others, we expected Rece Davis, Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard and the rest of the gang to make a long-awaited return to Boulder for the rematch of last year’s Pac-12 Conference Championship Game between Colorado and Washington.
We also offered an out-of the-box option, should ESPN look to scratch that itch, with an FCS heavyweight fight between Eastern Washington and Montana in Missoula a perfect opportunity to travel to a new venue. But the powers that be went even farther outside the box, choosing to broadcast from Times Square in New York City.
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New York isn’t a college football city. It’s not really a football city at all since the New York Giants and New York Jets have played their games in New Jersey for decades. Nevertheless, it’s not unheard of for college football’s weekly morning showcase to visit the City That Never Sleeps. In fact, we listed the Nov. 4 matchup between Harvard and Columbia at Robert K. Kraft Field (yep, that Robert Kraft) at Lawrence A. Wien Stadium among the candidates for Week 10.
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A visit to Wien Stadium would have made more sense since GameDay has taken in Ivy League games in the past, including Harvard-Yale and Harvard-Penn. Also, Columbia features one of the most unique and picturesque college football settings in the country. The Lions will even in town to host Georgetown Sept. 23, so the show could have gone to New York next week with an actual Division I football game as its backdrop.
But they’ll be in Times Square instead.