ESPN frustrated University of Cincinnati football fans Tuesday night with its broadcast of the College Football Playoff selection committee's Top 25 rankings reveal. The four-letter network made up for it by broadcasting its "College GameDay" show on the UC campus for the first time Saturday morning.
ESPN erected the set for its weekly, three-hour traveling college football pregame show on The Commons on the UC campus, and fans came out in droves to represent their city and cheer on the Bearcats ahead of their homecoming game against visiting Tulsa.
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"Obviously, it's just an exciting time for Bearcat athletics to have the biggest show in college sports here on our campus," UC Director of Athletics John Cunningham said. "It's a celebration of our athletics department.
"It's a celebration of our university, of our city. It's a testament to Coach Fickell and everything his staff has been able to do this year and their student-athletes. It's just so exciting to have them here and be a part of what we do at Nippert Stadium for the first time."
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Since venturing out of the television studio and incorporating live broadcasts in different locations in 1993, College GameDay had visited 77 different schools and 93 different cities. None of those was UC or Cincinnati.
That changed on Saturday.
On Halloween morning, ESPN gave the Bearcats a treat, informing Cunningham and the UC athletic department that the Clifton campus would be the site of its next College GameDay broadcast. The network's arrival set the stage for quite a homecoming atmosphere for UC fans.
"It says a lot about what our football program has done," Cincinnati men's basketball coach Wes Miller said. "One thing we're going to talk to our guys about is it's not just what they've done over the last couple months, it's what they've done over the last three or four years to get to this point."
Several fans brought hand-written signs (as is customary for the College GameDay experience) expressing their displeasure with No. 2-ranked (Associated Press/Coaches polls) Cincinnati entering the CFP committee's rankings at No. 6.
One fan held up a sign that read, "I had a better sign, but the committee wouldn't let it in!"
Fans even grabbed a pair of sledgehammers and obliterated a car with "Cincinnati #6" spray-painted on the hood.
The College GameDay crew, led by host Rece Davis and analysts Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, who played at Ohio State with Luke Fickell, Desmond Howard and former Cincinnati Bengals first-round draft pick David Pollack, broke down the Bearcats' chance of being one of the four teams in this season's College Football Playoff.
Herbstreit called Cincinnati a "complete" team that will ultimately be in the playoff after the Bearcats win out and "chaos" inevitably happens around them.
Pollack argued UC should be ranked ahead of Ohio State (No. 5), while Corso ranked Cincinnati third in his personal CFP rankings.
The broadcast culminated with celebrity guest picker Nick Lachey, most known for his role as lead singer of the multi-platinum-selling boyband 98 Degrees, joining the College GameDay crew on set. Lachey, a Harlan, Kentucky, native who grew up in Cincinnati, picked the Bearcats to win "big."
Corso also picked Cincinnati, donning the Bearcat mascot headgear.
