Lee Corso's 430 mascot picks: by the numbers
See all of Corso's headgear picks, including where he leans on cats vs. dogs, an incredible 17-0 streak, the home crowd influence & more!
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re yelling “Not so fast, my friend!”
Late Saturday morning—11:59 AM ET, to be exact—one of college football’s best weekly traditions will come to a ceremonious end. In front of a few thousand screaming fans on Ohio State’s campus, Lee Corso will use a mascot head to pick a winner for the biggest game of the week, then retire from television.
Corso has been doing this since Oct. 5, 1996, when he predicted Ohio State would beat Penn State by putting on Brutus’ headgear. He’s made 429 picks since, along the way creating viral moments for college football fans nearly every week1. I have plenty of favorites, but I think this clip perfectly captures Corso’s unique ability to work the crowd, charm his colleagues, and break the most basic rules of broadcasting 👇
There will be dozens of touching tributes to Corso in the next few days. This will not be one of them. Instead, Club Sportico is paying respect the only way we know how—by giving Corso’s tradition a full statistical analysis, complete with flashy dataviz.2
First off, the basics. Corso has been correct on 66.5% of his 430 picks. We debated in the Sportico office whether that was impressive or not, given that some of these games had heavy favorites. I think it is.
Next we looked at mascot type.3 Does Corso prefer dogs or cats? (Cats! 😺). Cats or birds? (Cats! 😺). Human mascots or animals? (Animals! 🐊). I get it. It’s way more fun to put on a Gator head than a big Demon Deacon…
This one is fascinating.4 It looks at how many GameDay events each conference has hosted over the past three decades. It clearly shows the Pac-12’s diminishing influence starting around 2010, the ACC’s diminishing influence starting around 2019, and puts in stark relief what most fans have come to accept—that the Big Ten and SEC have fully separated themselves from everyone else.
HALFTIME. Here’s another Lee Corso classic
Next we looked at specific schools. Shockingly, Corso is 17-0 (!) when picking USC. He’s also correctly picked all 12 Virginia Tech games that GameDay has done—four Hokies wins and eight Hokies losses.
If you want even more Lee Corso viz, here are three others that didn’t make the cut, including year-by-year results (he went 11-0 in 1999!) and his tendency to favor the home team and its rowdy fans 👇
We’ll leave you with one other Corso gem. Again, almost no one on national television could get away with this. Somehow, he did.
Jacob’s 🔥 Take: Corso had the worst record when picking Oklahoma State (1-3). But I get it. I’d also struggle to resist the chance to become Pistol Pete and blast firearms on live TV in front of a bunch of amped up Cowboys. That one win came after one of my favorite Gameday moments, when Corso selected 8.5-point underdogs. Does sports coverage get better than this?
On the most recent Sporticast episode, Eben and Scott discussed the topic on everyone’s mind…. the engagement of NFL star Travis Kelce and popstar Taylor Swift.
Within that conversation is a little bit of sports social media trivia. See if you know the answer 👇
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
That said, Corso clearly didn’t resonate among all sports fans. When we started this project in July, Lev didn’t know who he was.
All of the underlying data in these charts come from the great database kept by Cole’s GameDay Blog. The rest, of course, is all Lev Akabas.
This in itself was a fun challenge. Is Alabama’s mascot a color (Crimson Tide) or an animal (Elephant)? We chose animal for Bama. That’s what Corso uses when he picks the Tide.
Our colleague Jimmy Goodman is making his Club Sportico debut with this chart, and also maybe coming for Lev’s job??