Athletic department staff at Boise State arrived at work in the dark on Friday morning to find an orange glow emanating from the giant video scoreboard at Albertsons Stadium. A 6,000-square-foot video message towered over the south end of the stadium, promoting the arrival of ESPN College GameDay.
“Campus is buzzing,” a Broncos’ basketball program staffer told me on Friday morning. “People started camping out at 8 p.m. last night. Cool to see.”
Some big questions hung in the air, too.
As in, would GameDay be setting up for a Saturday broadcast expected to reach more than 2.5 million TV households if the Broncos hadn’t made the move to the Pac-12 this season? Would the glow around the college town be as bright had Boise State not defected from the Mountain West? Would the GameDay crew be somewhere other than Idaho this week?
I spoke 1-on-1 with Rece Davis, the host of GameDay, on Thursday. He’d arrived in Boise that afternoon, settled into his downtown hotel, and had plans to have dinner with ESPN college football reporter Pete Thamel and BSU football coach Spencer Danielson.