Confessions of an ESPN College GameDay Outcast

My one brush with the popular telecast did not go well.

Lee Corso and I go way back. Thirty-one years, to be exact. But we've actually never met, never had a conversation.

However, for one long Saturday, from morning to night, we became intertwined by the college football octopus that is ESPN College GameDay — with Corso repeating my name on the air every few hours and me cringing every time he said it.

I have only myself and my big mouth to blame for that. 

It was 1992 and GameDay, still a year from becoming the live, campus-rotating extravaganza that it is now, was a studio show that offered astute college football commentary plus varying game video clips to support it.

Back then, I somehow became a bizarre story and a controversial figure. As an Associated Press poll voter, I put Miami No. 1 on my Week 8 ballot — and this move effectively knocked the University of Washington, the team I covered for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, out of the top spot.

My reasoning for my actions: I watched the 7-0 Huskies, who had shared the national championship with Miami the season before, play poorly against a lowly Pacific team and couldn't with any conscience pretend I didn't see it and keep them No. 1.

As a result, my poll-altering vote was publicized, the UW fan base quickly learned about what I had done and Husky hell broke loose.

Yes, I now know what it is like to receive a death threat. I ended up disconnecting my home answering machine and ignoring my voice mail at work. That week, I threw away a pile of letters without reading them, certain it wasn't fan mail.

Which brings us to College GameDay. A UW sports publicist informed me mid-week that Chris Fowler, then a GameDay regular and still one of ESPN's leading college football voices, wanted to put me on camera and do an interview about the hometown guy who had cost his team the top spot in the poll.

By now, I was numb to all of the unwanted attention I had directed my way. Yet I was not above being absolutely clueless and making one more incredibly foolhardy move. 

As I stood outside Hec Edmundson Pavilion, looking across at Fowler, I thought of how silly the roundtable show could get at times, especially with Corso supplying plenty of studio banter, so I asked, "How do you want to do this, funny or straight?"

Fowler said it was my choice. I clearly made the wrong one. He stuck out a microphone and asked me why I had voted against the Huskies and I responded with wise-guy words that still haunt me to this day: "I flipped a coin and it came up Miami." 

It was an utterly stupid thing for me to say and it was as far from the truth as could be. I actually did a lot of homework each week and tuned in to a lot of games, before and after the Huskies played, in order to be an informed poll voter.

The following Saturday morning before the ensuing UW-Stanford football game, I watched my idiot interview on GameDay. A panel discussion broke out. They all agreed I should have my poll voter privileges taken away.

Corso took it one step further, strongly suggesting, "That Riley guy should be fired." I probably saw the clip of him calling for my head four or five times throughout the day while at home, at Husky Stadium and home again.

My nationally televised coin-flip quip and Corso's rebuttal were more than enough to have people recognize me when I walked through the stands to get down on the field near the end of the game. Fans jumped up and pointed me out. An entire section of people derisively began chanting my name, which was an experience as weird as it sounds.

The aftermath of all this: The Huskies went to the Rose Bowl for the third consecutive year that season, but they got caught up in the Billy Joe Hobert scandal, lost three of their final four games to finish 9-3 and ranked No. 9 — so I wasn't wrong in voting them out of the top spot, still no small victory for me.

Following my ESPN moment, I was now sought out by two dozen radio sports talk shows, foremost New York's WFAN, and a dozen major newspapers, all wanting me to retell my story, which kept getting worse. I decided I should try and set the record straight as best I could without any further quipster comments. I was humble, contrite, probably boring.

Ivan Maisel of the Dallas Morning News wrote how I "was the bravest man in America," but that hardly was the case. One of the most foolish maybe.

Today, I would like Lee Corso to know that I kept my job for another 18 years before the Seattle P-I closed its doors and continued to work for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and MSN.com as news editors and for Boeing as a globe-trotting writer. 

I now run this Sports Illustrated website and write books, unable to retire just yet. My poll-voting days ended long ago and my GameDay experience thankfully was a one-off. All of this has kept me out of the spotlight, which is a much safer existence.

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