Lee Corso to retire from College GameDay during 2025 Texas-Ohio State

Lee Corso, the longtime face and voice of ESPN’s College GameDay, will retire on August 30, 2025, bowing out during the Texas vs. Ohio State showdown in Columbus. The network plans a one-hour tribute special, Not So Fast, My Friend, ahead of his final on-air appearance, and Corso will make his last headgear pick in the stadium that began his most iconic moment on the show. The retirement closes a 38-year tenure on GameDay and marks the end of a unique era in college football broadcasting.

Corso’s journey to this moment spans more than six decades in the sport. A Florida State alumnus who played in the 1950s, he later coached at Louisville and Indiana, guiding the Hoosiers to postseason play and their first bowl victory. His firing at Indiana in 1982 became a well-known inflection point in his career arc, coming to light on the radio rather than in a private conversation. Yet Corso carried himself with grace, publicly cherishing the institution and moving forward to new opportunities. He joined ESPN in 1987, helping transform a fledgling pregame program into a national weekend ritual, a transformation punctuated by his signature headgear ritual that began in 1996 and became a...