College Football Season Kicks Off With Full Slate And GameDay Return

The first week of college football has arrived, boys and girls. Fans endured an eight-month wait to see this moment finally happen. A complete slate of actual games now fills the schedule. While Week Zero offered a taste, today marks the official kickoff for everyone. Every single team steps onto the field right now. The action runs from noon until midnight. Crowds are back in their seats. Pageantry returns with full force. Bands play on. It is finally here. This Saturday serves as a celebration of America at its best.

ESPN's premiere pregame show, College GameDay, also made its return. That matters greatly to fans across the country. We grew up watching this program during our childhoods. Now it anchors Saturdays for our children too. Characters have changed since Lee Corso took his final bow last year. Yet the vibe remains exactly the same. Nothing captures the spirit of fall quite like GameDay blaring in your living room at 9 a.m. on a crisp morning.

However, ESPN and GameDay messed up big time this morning by choosing country singer Lainey Wilson to perform the show's iconic theme song live from Baton Rouge. The result was horrific. Fans are fuming at ESPN for this awful decision. Lordy, just awful. This issue has nothing to do with Wilson personally. I like Lainey Wilson. I am glad ESPN chose a country singer to perform it. Ideally, Big & Rich should always handle the song. But this specific execution simply did not work. The sound was off. The microphone volume was too low. You could barely understand anything she said.

Of course, many folks immediately accused her of lip-syncing the entire performance. It was a disaster. Nothing about it worked out well. Social media comments confirm the widespread frustration. One viewer wrote that watching the segment was kinda rough. Another demanded to fire everyone associated with this decision to kick off the season. How can you move away from the original format? A third user asked why anyone would ruin the beginning of the show when a band could have played instead. Others called it seriously awful and questioned what happened after waiting all year for the first opening. Some users stated that performance ruined the moment right at the start. One person said the opening stunk and asked what was wrong with the traditional start. Whoever thought up that change needs a long time out. Another user urged ESPN to delete the post because of the awful lip-sync.

The internet is in complete lockstep on this one. No hung jury exists here. There is no mistrial needed. No further deliberation remains. Everyone agrees on the same page. This was a horrible decision by ESPN. Fair is fair, and I have to be fair here too. It stunk. We waited eight months for that? That feels like disgusting behavior. The network needs to clean this up immediately.