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One October evening over dinner, the crew for ESPN’s College GameDay discussed plans for the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff, which kicks off Friday night in South Bend, Ind.
“They were all pretty strongly in favor of, we have to be there for the first on-campus game,” ESPN coordinating producer Matthew Garrett tells Front Office Sports. But during this dinner, they decided they also wanted to travel to a Saturday game—meaning they would have to produce two full shows in different locations on consecutive days. “Everybody very quickly rallied behind that and everybody was in agreement.”
GameDay will broadcast an episode live on Friday afternoon in South Bend, leading into the inaugural campus game: Indiana at Notre Dame. The following morning, the show will take its usual Saturday morning slot, broadcasting a second full, live show from Columbus, where Ohio State will host Tennessee that night.
It’s a feat that Garrett and ESPN spokesperson Julie McKay believe has never been accomplished in the show’s decades-long history (outside of running special editions in quick succession).
Garrett, speaking with FOS on Wednesday from South Bend, was confident that ESPN could pull it off. “They are the best at what they do,” he says of the ESPN operations team. “They have the ability to move our traveling circus around and set it up wherever we need them to be.”
Though the GameDay crew has been planning the doubleheader for about two months, it didn’t know where it’d be going until two weeks ago. Garrett says that wasn’t much of an issue, given it’s used to having only six days’ notice during the regular season. It was ready for a scenario as extreme as a Friday night in Oregon and Saturday morning in Georgia.
When the bracket was announced Sunday, Dec. 8, the crew sprung into action. GameDay had already decided on the Friday night slot no matter what, and chose the Saturday evening matchup because it gave the show “the best opportunity to cover the day in totality.” An added bonus: Broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit, known for his exhausting travel schedules, could stay in one place all day Saturday for the morning show and for the evening call.
Calling the GameDay crew’s itinerary grueling is an understatement. The production team, along with talent, held a Zoom call Thursday night to finalize plans, and then Herbstreit went off to broadcast Amazon’s Thursday Night Football Broncos-Chargers matchup in Los Angeles. Herbstreit landed in South Bend around 4 a.m. with his golden retriever, Peter, who will accompany him throughout the weekend.
The rest of the team arrived in South Bend on Friday morning. The show will run from about 3:30 p.m. ET to kickoff, and it will move from Notre Dame’s Library Lawn to inside the stadium at around 7 p.m.
After doing their halftime hits, the GameDay crew will make its getaway: the “convoy” of crew and talent will fly from South Bend to Columbus, landing at around 1 a.m., Garrett explains. Then, they will all “sleep as fast as they can” until they have to report to Ohio State early Saturday morning.
The show’s operations crew mostly “divided and conquered” between South Bend and Columbus to build the set, since there wouldn’t be enough time to move it from one location to another on such short notice, Garrett says. A few items, however, will travel—including the goal posts used for McAfee’s kicking contest segment, which will be hoisted onto a large vehicle and driven the 250 miles from Notre Dame to Ohio State overnight.
The episodes themselves will include all the elements of the regular-season Saturday morning editions: Both shows will have guest pickers as well as surprise guests. McAfee will run his kicker segment, offering up $250,000 to the winner during each show. The crew will interview Notre Dame quarterback Riley Leonard and SMU quarterback Kevin Jennings during their warmups, and it will provide live look-ins from the other first-round locations of Austin and State College.
After the first round ends, the crew will have a little over a week to rest and recuperate. Then, starting Jan. 1, the show picks back up from the Rose Bowl (one of the CFP quarterfinal matchups) on New Year’s Day. But the rest of the postseason doesn’t get much easier: It’ll pull off another back-to-back stint the following week for the two semifinals, hosted at the Orange Bowl on Thursday, Jan. 9, and the Cotton Bowl the following day. And, of course, they’ll be at the national championship game in Atlanta on Jan. 20.
With little sleep and maximum airline miles, the GameDay crew is pushing its limits for the first-ever expanded Playoff. “You throw something at them that you think might be one bridge too far,” Garrett says. “And it never is.”
