The Surprising History of ESPN Gameday Locations

We have been begging ESPN's College Gameday to visit Missoula for the Brawl of the Wild for a month or so. Even KC from 96.3 The Blaze wrote about it the other day, so you know it's not just me going to bat for my employer.

We will find out soon enough if Gameday is Missoula-bound, but in the meantime, I looked up the stats on Gameday.

How many cities have hosted College Gameday?

There's a list of every College Gameday location on the official NCAA website. They don't provide the total number of locations, and ChatGPT was way off when I asked them to count the list. According to my half-assed research, there were 120 (ish) cities to host Gameday. That covers bowl games like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and unique locations like Times Square in New York City, Belfast, Ireland, and plenty more.

Credit: Luke Hales (Getty Images)

They've been to big schools like Ohio State, a record 26 times, and they cover small FBS schools like Western Michigan in Kalamazoo or App State in Boone, North Carolina.

Heck, they even covered Division III's Williams College in Williamstown, MA, in 2007.

Some other locations that grabbed my attention were Conway, South Carolina (Coastal Carolina), Bristol, Tennessee (at Bristol Motor Speedway), and Bowling Green, Ohio (Bowling Green).

In terms of FCS Schools, 10 have hosted — North Dakota State, South Dakota State, Jackson State, Montana State (don't bring this one up), James Madison (before they moved to the FBS level), Penn, Grambling State, Florida A&M, Harvard, and Richmond. That was surprising to me. I didn't think there would be that many, but that's awesome for the FCS. It's been 3 years since the FCS hosted Gameday.

Except for the omission of Missoula, of course, Gameday has done a great job seeing all sorts of different schools all over the country. We expect to see you here on November 22 for Griz-Cat. We are also expecting Pat McAfee to kick a field goal inside Washington-Grizzly Stadium.