Move over Pope Francis — another cavalcade of stars is preparing to take over Philadelphia.
With Penn’s Big 5 rival Temple off to a 7-0 start for the first time in program history, many around the country are beginning to take note ... including the powers that be at ESPN.
As the No. 21 Owls prepare to host No. 9 Notre Dame at Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday night in one of the biggest games in Temple history, ESPN’s “College GameDay” has elected to make a return to the City of Brotherly Love. Fresh off a stop at James Madison last weekend, the Saturday morning show focused on previewing college football games from around the country will take place in Philadelphia for the first time since 2002.
The show will be aired live from Market Street between Fifth and Sixth streets — directly in front of Independence Hall rather than on Temple’s campus. Despite having to clear hurdles corresponding to the federal nature of the site, ESPN made the announcement on Monday afternoon that it was sending “GameDay’s” crew to Philadelphia rather than the campus of Washington State.
“This was the toughest call we had to make in my 12-year tenure producing the show,” Lee Fitting, a senior coordinating producer at ESPN, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “There were two schools that “College GameDay” has not visited, in addition to having great seasons.”
After several years as a perennial loser near the bottom of the Pac-12 standings, the Cougars are off to a 5-2 start in 2015 and host No. 8 Stanford on Saturday. However, the fact that both the Owls and Fighting Irish are ranked teams gave Philadelphia the edge over Pullman, Wash.
“Having ESPN ‘College GameDay’ come to Philadelphia is tremendous not only for Temple football, but for the university as a whole, as well as the city of Philadelphia,” Temple Athletic Director Patrick Kraft said in a statement.
“GameDay”, which began broadcasting in 1987, has visited myriad campuses across the nation on a regular basis since 1993. However, over the course of 22 years, the show has made it to Philadelphia only once: Nov. 16, 2002, when it aired live from inside Franklin Field prior to Penn’s matchup with Harvard.
That was the first time “GameDay” went to a school outside the Football Bowl Subdivision. Since covering the Quakers’ 44-9 thrashing of the Crimson that day, the show has since gone to several other Football Championship Subdivision locations, including the campuses of Massachusetts, North Dakota State and Harvard.
On a weekly basis, “GameDay” features former players Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard and David Pollack, reporter Samantha Ponder, former coach Lee Corso and host Seth Davis, who visited Penn in 2014 to host the basketball version of College GameDay.
The show is best known for Corso’s ritual of putting on the headgear of the team he thinks will win the feature game on-site. While many wonder if the proximity to Independence Hall will cause the 80-year old will dress up as Benjamin Franklin, it seems unlikely: Corso pretended to be Penn’s founder when he picked the Red and Blue over Harvard more than a decade ago.
In between GameDay and the Temple-Notre Dame matchup at 8 p.m. that night, the Quakers — albeit outside of Philadelphia — will try to extend their winning streak to three when they face Brown in Providence.
Though Penn has not been over .500 in a season since November 2013, a victory may inspire ESPN to do something else it has never done before: Broadcast “GameDay” from the same place in consecutive weeks, previewing Penn-Princeton on Homecoming on Nov. 7.
Hey, it’s 2015. Anything can happen.
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