Lee Corso can keep going, and you hate college football if you disagree

Lee Corso is more than just a guy waving his hand in funny-looking headgear each Saturday on ESPN College GameDay. He’s the heart and soul of what college football should mean.

Say it with me. You’ve said it about countless other celebrities from all different walks of life. You’ve held the likes of Betty White, Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke, Mel Brooks, Tom Hanks, and Dolly Parton dear to your heart, claiming “we should protect them at all costs!”

The same should be said for ESPN legend, Lee Corso. So, I implore you, say it with me…

Lee Corso is a national treasure, and we should protect him at all costs!

But in Corso’s case, it’s not just an empty Twitter slogan. The longtime ESPN college football analyst and former coach is under attack, and he’s under attack from the people who should be cherishing him the most.

America’s ravenous college football fans.

Fans who should be hanging on Corso’s every word, appreciating his sense of humor, his gregarious and infectious personality, and his decades worth of college football memories are — on a weekly basis — painting the crown jewel of the College GameDay cast as some sort of doddering old fool who needs to be replaced for the sake of the show and its audience.

Balderdash, I say.

Shame on you. Shame on you all for even uttering such heresy.

You say you want Lee Corso replaced? Not so fast, my friends (yes, I’m shaking my pencil in your direction).

While he may not quite have the mental quickness he once did since suffering a stroke in the summer of 2009, Lee Corso is still very much on top of his game and, despite it taking perhaps a few seconds longer to express his thoughts, is just as fun to watch now as he’s ever been.

“The one thing I was really good at was being spontaneous. I was quick-witted,” Corso said in an interview with the Gainesville Sun last year. “I lost that with my stroke.”

Whether being spontaneous or reading from notes, or even being prompted gently by co-host Kirk Herbstreit, watching Lee Corso’s eyes burst with joy when he talks about a game he loves so much, and even listening to him hum with amusic indifference to his favorite part of the broadcast (“Silver Scrapes” by Chronic Crew, played coming back from commercial break around mid-show), it seems impossible not to cling to Corso and everything he means to college football.

Regular sidekick, and Abbott to Corso’s Costello, Kirk Herbstreit, has embraced the role of “caretaker” with his friend just as Corso did with him when the former Ohio State quarterback joined the show in 1996. It was the gentle and amenable Corso who helped Herbstreit get through the jitters and some early-career on-air gaffes.

The roles have now reversed, with Herbstreit waiting patiently for Corso to bring his point to a close, looking at him with a warm smile and reassuring nods that say, “keep going, coach, don’t listen to those producers in your headset.”

Some describe the scene as “sad to watch” or feel that Herbstreit is only enabling his friend to keep going when he should quit.

It’s neither sad on the part of Corso, nor enabling on the part of Herbstreit. It’s courageous. It’s heartwarming. It’s human, and we should be eating it up instead of pushing it to the side.

The cast and crew of College GameDay will always defend Lee Corso

Corso’s colleagues are also quick to come to his defense, as show host Rece Davis did recently in response to the outcry over Corso and his work on the show.

“I would encourage the people who were, perhaps, to use your word, unkind or cruel, to reserve a little judgment,” Davis said on the Dan Le Batard show.

And Davis isn’t the only one. Having spent time with the College GameDay cast and crew on more than one occasion, I can tell you that this is not just a merry band of co-workers participating in a television show. These people look at and treat each other like family.

From the producers to the statisticians and graphic designers, to the directors, and all the way up to the on-air talent — there’s no one who is looked at as expendable or unimportant to the members of this crew.

Least of all, coach Lee Corso.

Lee Corso is our three-eyed raven. He is the memory of college football. Approaching the age of 90, he is a part of the remaining few in a generation of men who went from player to coach to commentator, and who have witnessed nearly every major change in the game so many claim to be so passionate about.

Since 1987, Lee Corso has been a part of coffee and breakfast for a college football-crazed nation. His voice has been there as we check the brisket in the smoker, or come to the realization that, dammit, we forgot to buy extra ice again. Your eyes are glued to the set, regardless of who’s playing, when Corso makes the famed headgear pick and sends the show out to the noon kickoffs.

And now many of you want to just pretend none of it matters. But it does. It matters to Lee Corso, it matters to his College GameDay family, and it matters to those of us who truly and deeply love the game of college football.

The headgear pick is the gimmick. Lee Corso is the real deal, and he should be able to leave on either his terms or God’s. There is no middle ground. Anyone who thinks differently can pound sand and start watching infomercials on Saturday mornings.

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