BRISTOL, Conn. — The thing that makes Lee Corso so entertaining, so likable, is how nothing ever seems scripted. He never takes himself too seriously, whether during 28 years as a football coach or 31 years and counting on ESPN’s College GameDay, the past 22 of which have made him as much of a household name as you will find in the sport.
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Ask him about his time as a player at Florida State, though, and 83-year-old Corso doesn’t really have a good answer for you.
“I loved playing it. We played both ways, and I did a lot of things,” Corso says, wrestling with the appropriate response. “If you look, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna be, ah, I don’t wanna — if you look up all the things I did, I think there’s all kinds of records I set running, passing, catching, punt returns.”
Here he lets out a laugh, and GameDay PR ace Derek Volner interjects to say that Corso is trying to be modest.
“I’m trying to say if you look in the Florida State Hall of Fame, there’s a really good story about,” he tries again, lowering his voice, almost embarrassed, before ultimately settling on: “I did everything. I was pretty good. Look it up.
“The best thing is pass interceptions. I held the pass interceptions record for (32) years, and the guy that tied me was Deion Sanders, (on) the last play of the game against Auburn.”
Those 14 picks in the garnet and gold mean something to the Seminoles. His 311 picks in a suit and tie and mascot headgear resonate with an entire football nation each fall Saturday, such is the morning staple that GameDay has become for a generation.
“Do you know anybody else that makes a living putting something else on his head?” asks Corso, who devised the tradition while watching Brutus the Buckeye walk by the set the day before Ohio State’s 1996 game against Penn State. “I’m telling you, that has been an unbelievable thing for me.”
The ties to big names, big moments and, yes, big heads are everywhere for Corso, whose knack for being in the right place at the right time, for befriending folks big and small, knows no bounds.
Before Corso played at Florida State, the Brooklyn Dodgers offered him a $5,000 signing bonus to join their organization as a shortstop. But his father refused to sign the contract. Alessandro Corso had come to the States from Italy when he was 15. He had a second-grade education, and he laid terrazzo for 50 years. He and his wife Irma stressed the importance of education to their only child.
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Who unseated Corso at shortstop in Tallahassee, forcing a move to center field? Future World Series-winning manager Dick Howser.
Corso’s college roommate? Hollywood star Burt Reynolds.
“His looks and my car, we killed it together,” Corso gushes, noting how he spent a summer working with his dad to save up for that green ’52 Chevy.
He had initially wanted to be a college president, pursuing a master’s degree in administrative supervision. One can only imagine his potential fundraising gimmicks. But the coaching bug bit hard, and before he knew it, he was off with his college coach, Tom Nugent, to Maryland. That stint as quarterbacks coach led to coaching defensive backs at Navy, his jumping-off point to becoming a head coach.
When he found himself in living rooms recruiting against Army, he often would drop down on all fours, crawl around furniture and give prospects and their families an exaggerated taste of what life would be like on the other side.
“It was me against the Army guy, and I was trying to tell them: ‘Look, you can go in the Army and be in a foxhole, guns shooting at them,’ ” he says. “Go in the Navy and sit in a nice bed. It’s a great life as a Naval Academy officer.”
When Corso became head coach at Indiana, he worked alongside and regularly ribbed basketball coach Bob Knight, who had been at Army during Corso’s Navy stint.
“We’re gonna have our own bowl game in Oolitic, Indiana, which has a large Italian population,” Corso said at the time, per a 1977 Sports Illustrated article. “We’ll call it The Italian-American Bowl, and we’ll bring in a team we can beat, the way basketball coaches do when they bring in three teams they can beat and call it a Classic.”
That, of course, was nothing. Whether riding an elephant through Louisville to sell season tickets or calling a timeout to pose for a photo in front of a scoreboard at Indiana — how else do you commemorate your first lead against Ohio State in 25 years? — Corso went all out to enjoy the moment, always from the heart.
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“I’ve always considered humor as not a sign of weakness, but actually a sign of strength,” he says. “But you’ve got to use your humor wisely, or else you’re going to come off as a shtick. And even as a coach, I never was afraid, if a situation was humorous, to make fun. I’ve always believed that and it’s been very helpful.”
Seconds before action, Corso turns to Kirk Herbstreit on his left, shows his fingers and quietly asks for assurance that he is making the “Hook ’Em Horns” sign properly. It is GameDay’s season preview show, taped in an ESPN studio, and for all of the preparation and production meetings that go into these things, some moments are best left unscripted, like when Corso picks Texas to win the Big 12.
“This is what we love about ya, LC,” Herbstreit says on air, shaking Corso’s hand. “Going out on a limb there.”
“That maybe happens five or six times in a show,” Herbstreit says later. “He’ll turn to me and ask me something; that part he knows he can always rely on me for that, or pronunciation of a name. But for me the more challenging part of it is when we’re live and it’s the unpredictable thing. So I find myself, when he’s talking, I’m just always listening to his comment and just there for just a gentle touch when I need to do it.”
The on-air chemistry between two guys 34 years apart in age has grown over time, as they enter their 23rd season together on set. The son of a coach, Herbstreit says he was respectful of Corso to a fault in the early days, a “yes sir, no sir” deference that, as he quickly found out, does not exactly jibe with the star of the show.
“His first day he had an audition and it was great, because he sweated like crazy,” Corso says. “But he did very well.”
In separate interviews, Herbstreit refers to Corso as his second father, and Corso refers to Herbstreit as a son. The stumbles are more a product of the stroke Corso suffered in 2009 than they are of his age. Corso’s thoughts are as clear as ever, but his mouth cannot always process the words. In a fitting example while off air, he casually says, “Alabama’s got a great quarterback,” leaving the enunciation of Tua Tagovailoa — a tongue-twister for the sharpest of speakers — to others in the room.
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“It’s been years, and I still can’t talk,” Corso says. “I can’t do things with my right side. I had a left-side clot, which affects your right side, your speech and the ability of the right side, and that’s affected me. ESPN could’ve dumped me, and you can’t say enough for them. They never did even think about dumping me and they could’ve very easy, because I couldn’t talk.”
Network brass does its best to manage Corso’s workload each week, in Friday production meetings and on Saturday’s show, making it clear every step of the way that he has a job for as long as he pleases. (He signed an extension with ESPN in May 2017.) Corso resides in Orlando with his wife of 61 years, Betsy, whom he met while registering for classes at Florida State and who has been his best friend ever since. He does not travel much anymore aside from GameDay duties. He still goes into an office Monday through Wednesday for his other gig as business development director of Dixon Ticonderoga, which produces those No. 2 pencils he is always using on air to punctuate his signature line, “Not so fast, my friend!” (Company chairman Gino Pala, a golfing buddy, had asked Corso years ago to come on-board for some PR work.)
He might take the elevator up and down the second floor while bouncing between a studio and a production room, but Corso’s energy is no different from his first day here more than three decades ago.
“I appreciate it even more because I’m getting down to the end of my career,” he says. “And I appreciate every last game, every last show, every last meeting, because it might be my last, and therefore I’m at the end of my career. And you appreciate the little things more. I don’t mind getting on planes and coming to meetings and doing shows because I like them, because I’m always thinking this might be it.”
It just will not be on his own accord.
“Let me tell you something: On Thursday morning I get up, I get on a first-class plane and fly to a place and stay in a nice hotel and get a lot of great meals,” he says. “First class! Then I go and talk football for a couple hours, I see the best game of the year and I get on a plane (in) first class and I go home.
“And they pay me!” he continues, laughing harder than ever. “Why the hell would you ever think about retiring? It’s like stealing. It’s like stealing. Why would you ever think about retiring? I’m gonna be like that vaudeville act — the guy’s out there talking and talking and they get a hook and they try to hook him and bring him off the stage.”
The combination of Corso and live television was perhaps at its most memorable late in 2011, when he dropped an F-bomb while tossing aside an SMU megaphone to instead put on a Houston Cougar mascot head for the home crowd.
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Producers were almost late in counting down the seconds until the show was off air, the collective laughter having suffocated their truck’s tight corners. Carl Lewis, the guest picker, looked across the set and said: “Thank God we’re on tape delay,” only to be informed that they were not.
Corso was required to tape an apology that would run later in the day. He cooperated, saying he would do anything for ESPN. He then struggled so hard to conceal the smug grin on his face while reading a prepared statement that he had to reshoot the 12-second spot over and over.
Corso, Herbstreit, Rece Davis and Desmond Howard are treated like rock stars on whichever campus they visit. Signs asking Herbstreit for his hand in marriage or telling Howard or Davis they love them are commonplace.
“I got nothing,” Corso begins, setting up the zinger, “except two years ago I come on stage early and look up: There was a 98-year-old woman up there with white hair. She could hardly stand up. She had a sign that said ‘Grannies for Corso.’
“I said: You guys are looking at an AARP sex symbol right here. It’s amazing.”
Stories like these number in the dozens. They are why Lee Fitting, ESPN’s vice president of production, pauses for a whopping 40 seconds when asked for his favorite Corso story, running through the library in his brain and struggling to pick just one — “Oh my God, I could go on forever here” — before offering a tale with a personal touch about his 13-year-old and 10-year-old sons.
“Coach will call me once a month, once every few weeks in the season,” Fitting says, “and this is how great he is: He’ll call and say: ‘I’m just checking in on your boys. How are they doing? Make sure you leave work early today. Go get them and spend that extra time with them.’ Just a cool grandfather-type thing that he does that is another thing that makes him special.”
Anyone who has ever watched GameDay would not be surprised to hear that Corso’s favorite props come from Oklahoma State’s Pistol Pete, Texas Tech’s Raider Red or any of the other gunslinging mascots out there, as his exuberance shines through like an 8-year-old playing with a lighter for the first time.
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His favorite actual mascot?
“The Duck,” he says with some oomph. “The Oregon Duck is my favorite. He’s not only funny, but he’s funny to be with, and they relate real good to him out there. And I put the Duck (head) on, we ride motorcycles together. We dance together.”
What viewers see in the main event Saturday is the product of weeklong prep that starts on Sunday morning, once Corso knows where he is headed. From there, the creative juices get flowing, with the involved parties taking something of an omerta to ensure maximum surprise value come showtime. Corso formulates the general pick by Monday night and works on a sketch with producer Jimmy Gaiero and coordinating producer Drew Gallagher on Tuesday and Wednesday. Remote production coordinator Rob Parker works with the projected winning school to get a mascot head, a responsibility that often falls to the head cheerleader.
Corso’s 300th headgear pick came last October at TCU, when he correctly picked the Horned Frogs to beat West Virginia. GameDay has visited the annual Army-Navy game the past four years, and it’s an event that is near and dear to the old Midshipmen assistant’s heart. Louisville, which was Corso’s first head-coaching job, has hosted the show in each of the past two seasons, including once against Florida State, Corso’s alma mater.
The show opened last season on a Thursday night at Indiana, home to Corso’s longest coaching stint (1973-82) and the school responsible for his most memorable triumph, as his oldest son, Steve, caught a 27-yard touchdown pass to beat rival Kentucky in 1980. (Corso has three sons, one daughter and 10 grandkids. Three of his kids live in Orlando, while one son, Dan, is the president of the Atlanta Sports Council.)
More than 90 of his former players showed up in Bloomington to support their coach on set and on the field, where Corso was honored during the game with a program contributor award and was lifted on the shoulders of those former Hoosiers.
“The thing that impressed me, they paid their own way, not only to the game but to get there, and that really made me feel good,” says Corso, who choked up on air that night. “They honored me there. And see, as a coach, that’s the one thing you have an advantage: When you’re a businessman and you die, you leave money. But when you’re a coach, you leave legacies, pieces of you, in every one of those players you coach.
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“And that’s the thing. You can’t get out of coaching. What you miss the most is the relationship with the players.”
On Saturday, GameDay will kick off its 32nd season, originating from Notre Dame, where the show first ventured on the road 25 years ago for the school’s 1993 “Game of the Century” against Florida State.
Inside the Irish’s basketball arena, Corso placed a Seminoles hat on his head, heard the boos from the handful of fans near the set and quickly threw on a Notre Dame cap.
“It’s tough not to be influenced by this environment here,” host Chris Fowler said to him.
Corso immediately flipped back to Florida State, drawing more ire from the crowd.
“I don’t go out, because I’ve pissed off half the people in the country, really,” Corso says now. “I pissed somebody off every week.”
Disarming as ever, he comes back for more. The love from the fans is as vocal as ever. Herbstreit hopes he sticks around another 15 years. Heck, Sister Jean has yet to lose her charm, and she’s 99.
“No one has done more for the popularity of college football the last 30 years than Lee Corso,” Fitting says. “And fans appreciate that, and fans love him for that.”
(Photos courtesy of ESPN Images)
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