PROVO — "College GameDay" over.
The weeklong buzz started Sunday afternoon — ESPN's Saturday morning pregame football show was making its inaugural visit to Provo and the Brigham Young University campus.
Next came Friday's overnight anticipation, with hundreds of fans camping out and weathering early-morning rains and thousands more — complete with flags, posters and painted faces — filling early-morning queues.
And then once the two-hour national program began at 8 a.m. Mountain time, it was another buildup. Fans cheered on cue for the cameras, waiting for the concluding moments when "GameDay" co-analyst Lee Corso would predict the BYU-TCU game winner in trademark fashion — by putting on the mascot headgear of either BYU's Cosmo or TCU's SuperFrog.
"Come on, Lee. Come on, Lee," pleaded one Cougar fan anxiously watching the College "GameDay" set.
"Do the right thing, Lee. Do the right thing," countered a TCU fan standing near the first.
No matter that College "GameDay" contributor Desmond Howard had picked the visiting Horned Frogs, that analyst Kirk Herbstreit selected the Cougars, or even that guest prognosticator LaVell Edwards — BYU's Hall of Fame coach invited on the set for the show's closing minutes — cast his lot as expected with the home team.
No, the crowd was waiting for Corso, who first pulled out a Cosmo head, flirting with the BYU crowd by waving it over his head before flipping it over to Edwards and grabbing and donning instead a SuperFrog head to punctuate his pregame prediction.
Much to the vocal chagrin of the pro-Cougar crowd.
But Edwards quickly countered, putting the Cosmo headgear on himself.
"Lee had told me before, 'When we're up there, I'm going to throw you something,' " said Edwards, then giving his former coaching counter a jab. "I don't think he knows any more about it than anybody else."
Added "GameDay" host Chris Fowler later: "It's the first time ever we've had the guest picker put on the headgear. … And (Corso's) headgear picks have not been infallible."
And with that, the event was over, another 7 1/2 hours before the BYU-TCU kickoff.
The game — even though it was broadcast by cable-network competitor Versus — was the reason ESPN was there in the first place, the weekend's only pairing of two teams ranked in the initial BCS rankings.
"We're just setting the table," said Fowler of "GameDay." "It's the game that's the draw."
Fowler was speaking post-show from the back of the "GameDay" tour bus, where satellite feeds seven TV screens monitoring college football action across the country.
It's not just to keep up on the action, but who knows when Fowler or one of his ESPN cohorts will have to weigh in on a developing story during the day — similar to what happened the first week of the season when "GameDay" was at Alabama and BYU was upsetting Oklahoma in Dallas.
With Howard, Corso and Herbstreit long since gone from Edwards Stadium's shadows via their respective limos (Herbstreit off to Salt Lake City to catch a charter flight in order to call the Texas-Missouri game for ABC later Saturday night), Fowler was left to relish his first work assignment in Provo and hang around for the Cougar-Frog contest.
"The stadium, the mountains — it's the most beautiful backdrop you could ask for," he said.
And for BYU and its football program, having "GameDay" in town Saturday morning was all the national exposure it could ask for … that is, until the kickoff later that evening against TCU.
e-mail: taylor@desnews.com