By Hunt Palmer
The college football world will center around Baton Rouge this weekend.
While LSU-Alabama isn’t the matchup of unbeatens it has been in the past, Saturday’s showdown likely means an elimination game for the first 12-team college football playoff. ESPN’s College Gameday has announced it will emanate from The Quad.
Rece Davis will host. Ben, Kirk Herbstreit’s golden retriever, will hang out. Pat McAfee will humiliate some student trying to win thousands of dollars kicking a field goal. Nick Saban will get booed. Lee Corso will don some headgear.
All of that is for certain. The guest picker is not.
Since I had some time on my hands Sunday, I fired up the ol’ think machine and workshopped some ideas for that guest picker. Here are my five best ideas.
- Jim Cantore – Unfortunately, Rafael is brewing south of Jamaica. I’d prefer it if we didn’t have to talk about hurricanes in November, but no such luck. Early indications are that the storm will enter the Gulf of Mexico this week and could show up in south Louisiana at some point. Cantore has television experience. He’ll probably pick Miami to beat Georgia Tech. And the Crimson Tide.
- Paul Skenes and Livvy Dunne – The first family of LSU athletics feels like a reasonable choice here. Skenes started the MLB All-Star Game this summer. Dunne is a national champion with more than 5 million Instagram followers. The tough part is that gymnastics opens its season on Friday night in Knoxville. That’s a quick turnaround for Dunne.
- Herb Jones – The training room at the Pelicans’ facility is a little crowded. CJ McCollum, Trey Murphy and Dejounte Murray are all injured and rehabbing. But none of them went to LSU or Alabama. Herb Jones won SEC Player of the Year at Alabama, and he’s not going to be playing for three weeks because of a rotator cuff injury. He can still pick football games.
- Jordan Davis – Current country music superstar and former teammate of Hunt Palmer on the Shreveport Gators USSSA travel baseball team could be an option. Davis is an LSU alum with a football background. He quarterbacked the Byrd Yellow Jackets back in 2005. Earlier this year Davis was a guest on the Pat McAfee Show and performed at halftime of the Saints season opener against Carolina. That actually resulted in a Saints win. Remember what that feels like? Davis’s tour wrapped up in October. I’m sure Wheels Up can get him from Nashville to Baton Rouge on Saturday.
- Joe Burrow – Just take the rest of this list and trash it. There’s only one choice here. The Bengals have an open date this week and have won three of four. You want to pump some life into a campus that has already hosted Gameday 13 times? Bring the program’s most legendary figure back. Put Ja’Marr Chase up there on set with him. I’d like to hear Saban talk about the 559 yards and 46 points that duo helped produce in Tuscaloosa in 2019.
Shaq has already made his annual game. Alex Bregman did the honors in 2018. Perhaps Angel Reese gets a shot. But the list is the list. Burrow has to be the choice. Either way, campus is going to be abuzz for Saturday’s action.
Do the right thing, ESPN.
