Everybody who follows college football knows Lee Corso, the “not so fast, my friend” member of “ESPN College Gameday” who turned picking big ballgames into grand theater, usually by donning the headgear of his chosen team’s mascot.
Younger fans may not know that Corso played football at Florida State in the 1950s — Burt Reynolds was a roommate and teammate — and that he was a head coach of modest accomplishments at three schools from 1969 to 1984.
Corso helped make College Gameday into broadcasting’s favorite pregame show, and the praise that gushed out recently when, at age 89, he announced that he would retire after the 2025 season opener was well deserved.
But the tributes included a column in The Washington Post that recounted what may be his finest hour, and it has nothing to do with TV: In 1962, as a 27-year-old assistant at the University of Maryland, he recruited and mentored the first Black football player in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
“It can be said that college football is what it is, that the SEC is what it has become, that the ACC became what it was, heavily because of Corso,” columnist Kevin Blackistone wrote. “Because Corso dared accept an assignment. It was to integrate college football in the South.”
Today, the notion seems antiquated. College sports have been integrated for more than 50 years, in the South and everywhere else. But 1962 really was a different world; there was a riot at Ole Miss because the federal government forced the enrollment of a single Black student.
Corso set his sights on Darryl Hill, a Black wide receiver whom he noticed when the Maryland and Navy freshman teams played each other. Hill caught two touchdown passes from Roger Staubach.
Hill, now 81, reminded Corso during the recruiting pitch that “the ACC is a segregated conference. You know, in their bylaws, no Negroes.”
Corso’s response: “Well, that’s the point.”
Once Maryland admitted Hill, Corso also lobbied the team to accept the new player. Before a road trip to South Carolina, he held a team meeting without Hill and told the players the hotel where they had stayed in the past would not let the team in because it now had a Black player. The players voted to find another hotel.
Corso’s support, along with that of head coach Tom Nugent, began the process of integrating ACC football. Given the tenor of those times, it took courage for Corso to do what he did.
“That Corso, doing the right thing, the brave thing, is long, long ago. He has been usurped by the Corso known for high jinks,” Blackistone wrote. Corso, in fact, may be the last person any of us would expect to go out on an integration limb in 1962. And yet he did.
Hill believes the coach has never gotten credit for this, so it is proper that as Corso’s last TV appearance nears, his other work gets praised, too.
