The Penn Stater Magazine

From “Faculty Kid” to College Football Expert

April 28, 2009 at 4:41 pm Lori Shontz 3 comments

I’ll state my bias straight up: College GameDay, ESPN’s college football studio show, is one of my favorite TV shows of any genre. I love it because Chris Fowler, Lee Corso, and Kirk Herbstreit are experts who don’t take themselves too seriously. (Also, because mascots are very cool.) They have fun, and isn’t that what sports are supposed to be?

Fowler brought that vibe to campus last Friday afternoon when he spoke to a group of journalism students and college football fans. Malcolm Moran, director of the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism (additional disclosure: I am a board member), gave Fowler a big buildup, calling him the “ringleader” of GameDay. Fowler interjected, dryly, “Babysitter.”

Partly, Fowler came to campus to give students an inside look at the TV journalism business and his road to success. He did that humorously and earnestly—to the point that he once laughed and apologized for sounding like Tony Robbins.

“You have to have that genuine passion,” Fowler said. “Never have to fake it, and you’ll be ahead of the game.”

But he also has a Penn State connection. His father, Knox Fowler, was a theatre professor at the University in the mid-’70s, and during his junior-high years, Chris lived in State College—in the same neighborhood as our class notes editor, Julie Nelson ’86, who can attest to Fowler’s early love of pick-up football.

Fowler, a Midwest boy and die-hard Chicago Blackhawks fan, learned to love college football then, too. “Faculty kids” could go to a game for $1. The kids used to pass tickets through a chain-link fence at the south end of Beaver Stadium, which was more primitive back then. So, Fowler noted, “you could get four kids in for a buck if you were pretty sly.” (Julie, daughter of a Penn State accounting professor, confirmed this.)

Other notes from Fowler’s talk:

—He was so animated and candid discussing why he thinks college football should scrap the BCS and institute an eight-team playoff that his wife, sitting in the audience, cringed.

—On college football: “There’s something unique about the passion and the way a campus builds up the week before a game.”

—On Penn State’s game-day atmosphere: “When you guys behave yourself, the Whiteout is the most tremendous display of school spirit with students supporting their team in all of college football.”

—On GameDay: “The show is almost always careening out of control.”

Lori Shontz, senior editor

Entry filed under: Campus events, Penn State football, State College. Tags: Beaver Stadium, Chris Fowler, College GameDay, ESPN, John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, Kirk Herbstreit, Lee Corso, Tony Robbins.