Urban Meyer Confesses to Getting Upset by Lee Corso as He Ends 37-Year Tenure With Ohio State Bias

Lee Corso’s farewell flourish on College GameDay could not have been staged anywhere but Columbus. The 90-year-old slipped the Brutus Buckeye head over his shoulders, triggering a Horseshoe roar that felt equal parts celebration and goodbye. The gesture evolved into a tradition. Corso began the headgear shtick with an Ohio State pick in 1996 and ended with the same mascot, stitched a neat circle around a 37-season run that turned a Saturday-morning preview show into a college football ritual.

No one felt the symmetry more than Urban Meyer. Long before national titles and television analyst gigs, Meyer was a 22-year-old graduate assistant under Earl Bruce, cramming film in a cramped Ohio State office and soaking up the pageantry that surrounds the program. From those early days through head-coaching stops at Bowling Green, Utah, and Florida, he kept one constant: find a screen, any screen, so the staff could catch Corso’s closing pick before kickoff. The segment, he says, framed the day’s emotional temperature in every locker room he ever entered.

Lee Corso ESPN analyst Lee Corso before the College Football National Championship game between Alabama Crimson Tide and Georgia Bulldogs, Monday, Jan. 10, 2022, in Indianapolis, IN. Dylan Stewart/Image of Indianapolis Indiana United States EDITORIAL USE ONLY Copyright: xAP2022x NYWWP DylanxStewartx iosphotos263159“So it was a way of life for all of us. A class act and a true friend,” Meyer added, glancing toward the set where Corso waved his farewell. These two men represent different but complementary eras of the sport. Corso, the coach-turned-showman, made mascots and catchphrases part of the lexicon. Meyer, the tactics-obsessed program builder, leaned on any edge, emotional or analytical, to keep a roster locked in. 

When Corso finally removed the oversized head and handed it to a stagehand, the crowd’s roar softened into a long ovation that said as much about memory as it did about the moment. The headgear tradition will probably survive with new faces, but the pulse of anticipation, wondering which mascot would appear next, departed with the man who invented it. As Meyer offered a last clap from the FOX desk, two careers converged one more time: the charismatic broadcaster who brought showmanship to breakfast, and the coach who once measured his own confidence by the tilt of Corso’s head. The games roll on, but that shared heartbeat between studio and sideline now belongs to college football lore.

The numbers behind the magic

The statistics behind Corso’s headgear legacy tell a compelling story of both loyalty and accuracy. Over 430 picks spanning nearly three decades, he posted a 286-144 record, a .665 winning percentage that puts most Vegas oddsmakers to shame. But a deeper dig reveals his clear favorite. Ohio State earned the nod 45 times before Saturday’s finale, nearly 20% more than runner-up Alabama’s 38 selections. That Buckeye bias was smart money. Corso went 31-14 when donning Brutus, validating Meyer’s instinct that the old coach’s picks carried genuine weight in determining a program’s Saturday fate.

What made Corso’s devotion to Ohio State particularly meaningful was its consistency across eras. From Buckeyes’ 1990s squads through Jim Tressel’s championship runs to Meyer’s own dominant stretch, the Brutus head appeared on Corso’s noggin regardless of roster turnover or coaching changes. He achieved perfection exactly once, an 11-0 season in 1999, but his Ohio State selections provided the most reliable bellwether for a program’s trajectory. When Corso slipped on that oversized head in Columbus, it signaled more than a game prediction; it was a weekly referendum on the sport’s most scrutinized program.

The circular nature of Saturday’s finale, Corso’s first and last headgear picks both featuring Brutus, gave Meyer’s reflections extra resonance. The FOX analyst was honoring a 29-year relationship between broadcaster and program that outlasted four head coaches and countless roster changes. That Corso closed his career by picking the same school that launched the tradition proves some bonds transcend the volatility of modern college football. As Meyer noted, it truly was “a way of life”, one that ended exactly where it began, in the heart of Ohio.