Hello, Friends. 

GameDay is coming to Augusta National, and joy cometh in the morning. 

Hopefully, with all due respect to the so awful it’s somehow enjoyable “Coming to your City,” GameDay arrives at The Masters with only one theme song.

The way it should be.

To be honest, the move, as strange as it sounded when the notifications hit our phones, makes sense.

College GameDay, like the Masters, is part of the fabric of an American sporting life. One in the spring, one in the fall, but storied traditions all the same. Year to year, season to season, College GameDay marks the passage of time, the same way that the first Masters commercial in late January reminds us of the coming tax season, or makes Georgians like me, already weary of winter, think of spring. 

The first Masters, played in 1934, was composed of tournament founder Bobby Jones and a few close friends and colleagues. It was, like College GameDay, an aspirational idea, a calculated gamble by Jones that if you brought together the best talent and brought it to the best atmosphere, people would embrace it. The USGA originally refused to embrace the tournament, declining Jones’ invitation to hold the US Open at Augusta National. From rejection, a tradition unlike any other was born.

College GameDay also had humble, aspirational beginnings. The show began in a small ESPN studio in 1987, a year removed from the Golden Bear’s last charge at Augusta, with the roars of the patrons and Verne Lundquist’s call of “Yes Sir” still rustling through the Augusta loblolly pines. For six years, the talents of Tim Brando, the late Beano Cook and Lee Corso carried the show to surprising ratings returns, but ESPN always felt it was capable of being more.

Like the Masters, it took a little while for GameDay to become a cultural institution. That process likely began in 1993, when the show hit the road for the first time to cover No. 1 Florida State’s visit to No. 2 Notre Dame. 

A show that first went live at Notre Dame Stadium, one of America’s sporting cathedrals, will now broadcast live from Augusta National, perhaps America’s greatest sporting cathedral.

There won’t be pimento cheese sandwiches or patrons on Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie’s monument beneath the Georgia pines next month. Instead of blooming azaleas, pine pollen and Easter in the warm, spring air, there will be changing autumn leaves and cool November breezes.  

Like the absence of fans at College GameDay sites, the absence of Masters patrons and magisterial Moving Day roars, perhaps more than the autumn tournament date, will be a sobering reminder of all we have lost during this terrible, trying year. 

And yet the games are going on, bringing pockets of joy to so many people who have lost so much.

It’s fitting, I think, that these two cultural institutions, so much a part of so many American lives, should merge. That they should do so on a golf course located deep in SEC country is all the more appropriate.

The South, as we’ve been reminded off the field this year, is a place with a past. If you drive across the South and through SEC country, you’ll eventually pass through Augusta headed one way or the other. Along the way, on country roads, byways and highways, the South will tell you a complicated story. 

The South, like Augusta National, is beautiful, small towns and forests and miles of lush, green fields. It’s where most all the good music you’ve ever heard was born — soul, rock, country, blues — all of them. And college football is part of that complicated story too, good football and music and gorgeous golf courses as bright as Georgia sunshine – you just can’t escape it.

The South can’t escape the old history either, the looming specters of the Civil War and Jim Crow and racism that soiled so much of this strange, raging American summer. But just as the Masters dealt with its own racial past, integrating in 1990, only 7 years before a man of color named Tiger would become its greatest champion, college football has tackled racism this autumn, with players from the SEC and voices from College GameDay leading the way. From Ole Miss and Mississippi State players lobbying to change an antiquated flag to Nick Saban and Dan Mullen marching with players demanding nothing more than the chance to stand as equals, football has represented a great reminder that so much more still unites us than our bitter politics divide us.

The return of SEC football unified us, too, and more than anything that’s happened in this most surreal of college football seasons, it made life feel the most “normal” again. 

Socially-distanced stadiums aren’t normal and a Masters played in autumn without patrons isn’t normal, but the fact the games went on, as safely and smartly as possible, stands as a resounding reminder of the resilience of people, from our school teachers putting their own health second to our frontline first responders and medical heroes who have worked long hours at high personal risk to themselves and loved ones. 

If, for a few hours on Saturday, football could make people smile again, regardless of color or creed, that’s a good thing, and playing the Masters this November will be, too.

And so it’s fitting that GameDay will take the stage at Augusta National, on a huge SEC football weekend and a weekend at the Masters certain to be filled with SEC contenders.

The logistics of how the show will function remain to be seen. Will the likes of SEC stars Justin Thomas, Bubba Watson, Brandt Snedeker, Billy Horschel or Kevin Kisner be available for interviews ahead of Moving Day tee times? Would they want to be? If the likes of Phil Mickelson misses the cut, will the well-known gambler slide in as an ideal guest picker? Will a plate of pimento cheese or peach ice cream sandwiches make its way to center stage? Will Corso don a green jacket?

Whatever happens, what a sweet gift in such a sour year. College GameDay at the Masters. Two traditions unlike any other.