- College football’s premier pregame show travels to Eugene, Ore., for the 11th time – and its fifth visit to the site of a Ducks-Bruins rivalry game
- WNBA star and Ducks women’s basketball legend Sabrina Ionescu will join the GameDay crew as this week’s celebrity guest picker
ESPN’s College GameDay Built by The Home Depot travels west to Eugene, Ore., for its Week 8 stop ahead of the Pac-12 showdown between No. 9 UCLA and No. 10 Oregon. GameDay will be live from ‘The Quad’ on the Oregon campus from 9 a.m. – noon ET | 6 – 9 a.m. PT (ESPN and ESPNU, ESPN App) on Saturday, Oct. 22, for its 430th road show.
GameDay is making its first trip to Eugene since 2018 and this is the 11th time Oregon has hosted the show – more than any other Pac-12 school. GameDay’s fifth pregame show to originate from the site of an Oregon-UCLA game, Saturday marks nearly one year to the day of GameDay’s 2021 show on-campus at UCLA before the Ducks topped the Bruins 34-31 at the Rose Bowl.
In the last seven top-10 matchups GameDay has visited, home teams have won and the last eight games have been decided by fewer than 11 points. Six have been decided by seven points or less.
Rece Davis leads the show in his eighth season as host and is joined at the desk by GameDay analysts Desmond Howard, Kirk Herbstreit, Lee Corso, Pat McAfee and David Pollack. Reporters Jen Lada, Gene Wojciechowski and newcomer Jess Sims, along with research producer Chris ‘The Bear’ Fallica and college football insider Pete Thamel, round out the GameDay crew for the season.
College GameDay continues its strong start to the season following its third week topping 2.2 million viewers last Saturday at Tennessee. Only five episodes hit the mark in the prior five seasons combined. Week 7’s audience was a 16% increase over the same week in 2021, tallying 2.98 million viewers in the final hour. To date, GameDay is averaging its highest audience since 2009 (2.1 million viewers).
Scheduled Features & Highlights
- Made for Manhattan – Adrian Martinez’s football career hasn’t just been a journey. It’s been more like a saga. But after four years of wandering in the Nebraska football desert, he seems to have found an oasis of happiness in the purple of Kansas State. (Gene Wojciechowski)
- Something’s Bruin – UCLA offensive stars Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Zach Charbonnet discuss their chemistry and connection on the field, the reason this Bruins team feels different and why they feel absolutely no pressure heading into Saturday’s game in Eugene. (Jen Lada)
- Leader of the Quack – For 35 seconds every Saturday, Doug Koke is the most popular person in Eugene. Every other day, he is just your average retired printing salesman who owns a Harley Davidson. Koke has led the Ducks out of the tunnel since 1999 but after 23 years, he’s decided to hang up his helmet and take one last ride off into the sunset.
Syracuse head coach Dino Babers will join the show for this week’s ‘Live WIRED’ ahead of their matchup at No. 5 Clemson while Oregon head coach Dan Lanning will join live on set ahead of the Ducks’ top-10 showdown.
Oregon alum and Ducks women’s basketball legend Sabrina Ionescu will join the GameDay crew as this week’s celebrity guest picker – the first time a WNBA player has joined the show for the Saturday selection. Ionescu etched her name in the record books during her tenure at Oregon, becoming thea NCAA all-time leader in career triple-doubles, the Pac-12 Conference all-time leader in assists and the only NCAA Division I basketball player to record 2,000 points, 1,000 assists and 1,000 rebounds in a career. Ionescu, a 2022 WNBA All Star, just completed her third pro season after being selected as the first overall pick by the New York Liberty in the 2020 WNBA Draft.
- Corso’s Count
- After picking underdog Tennessee to win outright last week, Lee Corso has now correctly picked all six games this season; dating back to last year, he has won his last 10 headgear picks
- Corso has donned Oregon headgear 20 times and is 13-7 with those picks; however, he’s lost each of the last three times he’s picked the Ducks
- Corso is 4-2 when picking against Oregon
- Corso has picked UCLA three times and has lost two of the three games. He is 3-2 when picking against the Bruins
- Saturday will be Corso’s 390th headgear pick
ESPN’s Expanded Digital Coverage
ESPN’s social and digital pre-pregame show, Countdown to GameDay Live, continues its sophomore season with the Week 8 visit to Oregon. Co-hosts Christine Williamson, Harry Douglas and Harry Lyles Jr. will be live from campus on Oct. 22 at 8:30 a.m. ET. The show is available across Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and the ESPN App.
Additional GameDay updates can be found via ESPN PR’s Twitter and College GameDay’s Twitter and details throughout the week can be found HERE and on College GameDay’s Hub HERE.
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