Syracuse, N.Y. -- The Syracuse-Notre Dame football game seems like the most interesting game on the college football schedule next week. It certainly is around here.
It is the only game between two teams ranked among the 15 best in the country. It has College Football Playoff implications. It features a rebounding program against a national power.
Syracuse fans were understandably perturbed when ESPN's flagship college football program, College GameDay, trotted out a promotional video from broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit that declared that "there's one game that really stands out," and then declared it was Cincinnati-Central Florida.
Herbstreit's video was certainly a bit of promotional hyperbole but the question remains why ESPN GameDay would prefer UCF as its destination?
Let's start with the fact that GameDay doesn't promote itself as attending the week's biggest game. Instead, the television program prefers to say that it visits the week's biggest storyline.
While Syracuse's game is bigger from a national perspective because Notre Dame has the inside track to a College Football Playoff spot, it can be argued that the storyline surrounding the Central Florida team is larger on the national level. The Golden Knights have won 22 consecutive games and have unofficially claimed last year's national championship.
"We always say that College GameDay goes to the best storyline of the week," said Derek Volner, a manager with ESPN communications. " UCF has the nation's longest winning streak at 22 games. They have a game with 9-1 Cincinnati, which trails UCF by one game. That storyline with UCF is one of the best in football, not only this year, but for the past two years. They've earned the opportunity for GameDay to head South."
There are, according to experts in sports media, additional factors that are almost certainly at play other than ESPN's stated preference for the best storyline on a weekly basis.
John Ourand, who covers sports media for Sports Business Journal, said GameDay tries to appeal to a diverse audience, representing different geographic regions and conferences.
"In making their picks, ESPN likes to visit all areas of the country and many different college conferences and schools," Ourand said. "College GameDay was just in Boston College - another ACC school in the Northeast. I would imagine that hurt Syracuse's chances this week as much as anything."
Outside of Top 10 matchups, the program has almost always avoided broadcasting games featuring the same conference on back-to-back weekends.
It's also been more than three years since the program visited an American Athletic Conference campus. The program's last trip to the American Athletic Conference was for Notre Dame and Temple on Oct. 31, 2015, when the show broadcast from Philadelphia.
GameDay has visited ACC campuses six times since then, as well as broadcasting from the ACC championship game in 2017.
A case can certainly be made that a visit to UCF was due.
"It really is a compelling story," said Brian Moritz, as assistant professor of communication at SUNY-Oswego, who operates the blog Sports Media Guy. "It's the little guy -- well, it's funny that the little guy is the biggest school in America -- but it's the little school fighting to get up there with the big schools nationally. It's a good storyline. An as much as SU fans might be bothered and might not be thrilled, you could easily imagine Central Florida fans feeling the same way."
NBC broadcaster and Syracuse alum Mike Tirico, who previously worked at ESPN, said he believed ensuring an electric atmosphere was also probably a consideration for the network.
While it might not play in a Power-Five league, Central Florida is the largest school in the country with an enrollment of more than 63,000 people. Students will almost certainly be out in full force for a big game and the television program's first visit.
While ESPN's Times Square visit a year ago received positive reviews in the media, the atmosphere for a November game in The Bronx would be much less of a guarantee.
"I think, for sure, one of the things is College GameDay feeds off being on a college campus a little bit," Tirico said. "Students are there at 9 in the morning with the signs and all that. I can't speak for (ESPN) but I don't know how you replicate that in the Bronx when neither campus is within an hour or two of where the game is. I'm sure that was a part of it."
The media experts largely dismissed the idea that ESPN's decision is based heavily on a desire to promote its own content on either ESPN or ABC, a common suspicion among college football fans that has been noted by a number of SU supporters this week.
While the closed-door nature of the selection and Disney's array of business interests will always generate suspicion, a look at the history of College GameDay makes it clear that the game being broadcast on ABC or ESPN isn't an overriding concern.
Six of the 13 GameDay locations that have been broadcast or announced this year have been at games broadcast by NBC, CBS or FOX. The season began at NBC's Michigan-Notre Dame broadcast, and has also visited two Fox (Stanford-Oregon and Oregon-Washington State) and CBS (Florida-Georgia and Alabama-LSU) locations. GameDay will also broadcast from the Army-Navy game, a CBS broadcast, on Dec. 8.
"ESPN has always maintained that its selections are editorially independent," Ourand said. "Every season, it seems, it hosts the show from a stadium where the game is on another network. If it was truly interested in promoting its own games, it would stage GameDay at the site of its primetime ABC game each week -- something that it does not do."
Tirico suggests that Syracuse fans take solace in the fact that, with a roster looking like it's built for the long-haul, GameDay's first visit to the actual SU campus isn't nearly as difficult to envision as it used to be.
"From Syracuse's perspective hopefully this is not a blip and it's starting to build something big football-wise again, similar to the days of (Dick MacPherson) and (Paul Pasqualoni)," Tirico said. If that happens GameDay will finally be on campus. I would say that if Syracuse fans are disappointed they should wait and hope GameDay shows up on campus down the line and the football team is worthy of that."
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