Head of his class

 Time now to put on an alligator head and salute the man who's never taken himself so damn seriously, because didn't anyone ever tell you college football was supposed to be fun? Didn't any of you notice what an absolute gosh-darn hoot it is?

Well, step right up, then, and hand some flowers to Lee Corso, who is 89 going on 17 and is about to don his last gator (or lion, or tiger, or Oklahoma State cowboy) head. The other day he announced he's retiring after one last ESPN College GameDay broadcast Aug. 30, and the salutes came rolling in from all quarters. Because how does Lee Corso not warm the cockles of your heart, whatever a cockle is? 

You'd have to be the Scroogiest of Scrooges not to give the man his due, even if in his later years his fastball was not what it once was. He's been a part of GameDay -- the fun part -- since it premiered in 1987, and for nearly the last 30 years he's been the grand finale of the whole banana split. That's when he started choosing the winner of whatever game he and the GameDay gang were at by donning the head of that school's mascot.

So, yeah, he's worn a Florida Gator head, oh, you bet. And the head of the Oklahoma State Cowboy. The Penn State Nittany Lion? You bet he'll stick his head in its papier mache mouth. A TCU Horned Frog head? A Brutus the Ohio State Buckeye head? A Colorado Buffalo head, an Oregon Duck head, an Alabama Crimson Tide elephant head, even the full armor of a USC Trojan?

Bring 'em on. It's what America is waiting for, right?

The dirty secret behind all this tomfoolery is Corso knew his football, too, and when he was a coach he wanted to win as badly as anyone. But he was also a realist.

He knew, for instance, that when he came to Indiana in the early 1970s there was an excellent chance he wasn't going to win a lot, at least at first. So one game he and the team arrived on the field in a double-decker bus. He got Woody Hayes all wrathy once when the Hoosiers scored first against one of Woody's Ohio State juggernauts, and Corso gathered his team in front of the scoreboard for a picture.

Then there was the time he scheduled a home-and-home with USC because, as he put it, he wanted to keep his promise to bring a Rose Bowl team to Indiana. And that time at Louisville when he rode an elephant to give his program some badly needed pub.

A few years later came his spectacularly ham-fisted firing in Bloomington, which school officials announced while Corso was out of town, the cowards. A few years after that came College GameDay, and Corso's signature line "Not so fast, my friend", and all the rest.

Want know something, though?

In 38 years, his best GameDay moment might not have been all those mascot heads, or the time he dressed up like the Notre Dame leprechaun, or the time he dressed up as Ben Franklin when GameDay went to an Ivy League game between Penn and Harvard. It might have happened just last fall.

That's when fellow Gameday host Kirk Herbstreit broke down on the set talking about his beloved golden retriever Ben, who passed away after becoming something of a Gameday mascot himself. The guy sitting next to Herbie promptly reached over and gave him a grandfatherly pat him on the shoulder.

I don't have to tell you who that guy was. You know.

It was Lee Corso.  Ol' Mascot Head himself.

And the head of his class, of course.