‘College GameDay’ is going to Washington State, and that’s awesome

It’s the show’s first trip to Pullman. Cougars fans earned it.

College GameDay going to Pullman, Wash., in Week 8, to broadcast live from outside Washington State’s game against Oregon. Both teams will enter 5-1, and the winner will have control of the Pac-12 North heading into the stretch run.

This is awesome:

This is why:

Washington State fans have shown an incredible desire to get GameDay.

For more than 200 straight weeks, a Washington State fan (or, usually, a group of them) has gone to the trouble of making sure the WSU “Ol’ Crimson” flag shows up behind the show’s set. It’s morphed into more than this, but the initial goal was to get the show to Pullman:

“We don’t really do this anymore for it to go to Pullman, and if it does, that’ll be fantastic and we look forward to being there,” flag coordinator CJ McCoy says. “We do this because it’s about joy, and there are a lot of Cougars that’ll wake up early on the West Coast and see the flag and go back to sleep. They just wanna make sure that it got there.

“And if it wasn’t for those Coug fans out there that really wanna wave the flag and show their pride, this wouldn’t happen. As much as Tom and me and the rest of us would like to keep this thing going, it only keeps going because of those fans. So props to them for their dedication and commitment to spreading Cougar pride everywhere.”

GameDay’s expressed interest in going to Pullman before.

The show’s on-air personalities and top producers have occasionally nodded over the years to their interest in making the trip. Kirk Herbstreit told SB Nation right before the 2018 season that Pullman was his most desired GameDay destination:

“The big one would be Washington State, just because they’ve had this flag traveling around for years,” he said. “They were one of the first flags we ever — now we have thousands of flags and signs — but they were one of the first flags we ever had. To be a random Washington State flag, out behind us; their team wasn’t even playing at the GameDay that we might be at, and that thing traveled around the country, and it still travels around the country for years.”

“When they go there, I think it will be a very, very exciting show filled with crimson flags everywhere and probably some surprise for all of those shows that have hosted us over the past 14, 15 years here,” McCoy, one of the flag coordinators who’s made the 200-plus-week streak happen, told SB Nation in 2017. “So we’re looking forward to that happening.”

This should be an emotional, exciting day for everyone.

And, look: It’s not like there were many great options on the Week 8 slate.

Some of this is pending late-night Saturday results and Sunday rankings releases, but we’re only looking at a few games with huge stakes and hype for this week:

• Michigan at Michigan State
• NC State at Clemson
• Colorado at Washington, maybe, though Washington’s out of the Playoff and Colorado’s an extreme long shot despite entering Week 7 without a loss
• Mississippi State at LSU
• Oregon at Washington State

Michigan-MSU has major Big Ten East ramifications, but it’s also guaranteed to be a rock fight of a game. More importantly, GameDay has already posted up at two Michigan games this season, including hanging out in Ann Arbor in Week 7 for the Wisconsin game. With Ohio State-Michigan still to come, that’s a whole lotta Michigan.

GameDay visiting Washington the week after the Huskies got knocked out of the Playoff with their second loss would be really weird. Plus, the network’s been in a feud with the Huskies for two seasons now. That wouldn’t have made sense as a destination.

NC State-Clemson is fine, but not that exciting. Clemson’s just going to win. Mississippi State-LSU could be great, but GameDay probably wants to do the Alabama-LSU game the first weekend in November. There just wasn’t anything approaching this good a choice.