In sharing who the angriest college football fans in the country might be after Week 2’s games, Paul Finebaum let it slip that College GameDay wasn’t originally supposed to be heading to Columbia, South Carolina, this weekend. The premier traveling college football pregame show was set to be in Lexington, Kentucky until it wasn’t.
Joining Matt Barrie on The Matt Barrie Show on ESPN’s College Football YouTube channel, Finebaum spilled the beans on the original plan for GameDay in Week 3. He also took a dig at GameDay, calling their decision to send the show to Columbia, South Carolina, “one of the more bizarre GameDay choices in its history.”
“I was in Lexington on Saturday,” Finebaum said. “You could go to Auburn, you could go to a lot of places where good football…In Lexington, all the students were asking me yesterday, because Georgia comes there next week, ‘You think GameDay will be here?’ GameDay was going to Lexington…For GameDay to go to Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, they go every year, sometimes twice; they don’t go to Lexington, but once every 20 years or so.”
GameDay will be in Columbia, instead, after South Carolina beat the brakes off Kentucky in a 31-6 win over the Wildcats in Week 2. Had Mark Stoops’ squad won a conference game at home, Brock Vandagriff and Co. would’ve played host to Pat McAfee, Nick Saban, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard and Lee Corso. Instead, the Georgia transfer will face his former team with a lot less fanfare.
Even though Lexington might not have been the most obvious choice after Kentucky’s 25-point loss to a team that struggled to beat Old Dominion at home, there were other options besides Columbia. And while Finebaum didn’t explicitly name them, he was left scratching his head over his network’s decision.
“I had callers this week from Columbia say, ‘Hey, when do you think we’re gonna get rid of Shane Beamer?’ They were as down on him as they could be; now they have College GameDay?” Finebaum said Sunday. “Which — I don’t know where that bus was going. Listen, GameDay is great, but the idea that GameDay would go to LSU at South Carolina? I mean, that is one of the more bizarre GameDay choices in its history.”
Shane Beamer and his Gamecocks quite literally stole GameDay right out of the hands of Lexington.
While we won’t delve into every alternative location for College GameDay this week, it’s intriguing that Finebaum would publicly criticize his own network’s decision to send the show to Columbia.”
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.