by Ryan McGee
Contents
Foreword by Rece Davis
Prologue
1. If You Can Officiate Sigma Nu vs. the Pikas, You Can Work the Rose Bowl
2. Big Time, Small Colleges
3. Home Games
4. Yea, Though I Walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death
5. ACC-elerating
6. The Wall of Screaming
7. Go (Big) East, Young Man
8. Love the Good Days, Own the Bad Ones
9. Hey Ref!
10. Changing of the Guard and of the Game
11. The Long Goodbye
12. Zebra Emeritus
Photo Gallery
Foreword by Rece Davis
In the summer of 1997, just a couple years into my tenure at ESPN, I got a call from one of our executives. He said, “We’d like you to host the weekend version of RPM2Night.” It was a nightly show on still-new ESPN2 dedicated entirely to motorsports.
Now, in the minds of those who make such decisions, this probably made perfect sense. Hey, Rece is from Alabama. He probably loves motorsports! At least, that’s what I imagine they thought. It didn’t make as much sense to me. First, I was hosting NBA2Night and I had just been the studio host for the NBA Finals on ESPN Radio. That role gave me an elevated courtside view of the Michael Jordan “Flu Game.” I was working with play-by-play legend Brent Musburger and ESPN legend Dan Patrick, who was covering the Finals for SportsCenter. I was having a blast. My primary ambition was plotting how to parlay the NBA hosting role into working on the sport I’d grown up loving most, college football.
So, I replied to the executive on the other end of the line, “If you’re thinking, ‘Hey, let’s get the Southern guy to do the car racing show,’ then you’ve got the wrong dude. Don’t get me wrong; I know the show is important, and I’ll work my tail off to learn it. But I have to tell you that I only have a functional knowledge of the sport.” I knew that Jeff Gordon drove car No. 24, Dale Earnhardt was No. 3, and Rusty Wallace was No. 2. That’s about it. They wanted me to take the host role anyway. Becoming the weekend host of RPM2Night was how I met Ryan McGee.
Ryan was a production assistant on the show and a rising star. He had great vision and insight for television production. He was patient and helpful while I got my racing knowledge up to speed. When he brought me a shot sheet (the script page an anchor uses to describe the highlight) or a story idea, he included plenty of extra detail to help me along. Maybe he did that for everyone, but he probably felt an obligation considering we were among the very few Southerners working in Bristol. Ryan claims we were the only two. We were definitely the only two who fully appreciated real sweet tea (you can’t just add sugar after it’s brewed) and the Third Saturday in October, between his Vols and my Crimson Tide.
Even if we bled different shades in the Alabama-Tennessee rivalry, there was a near-instant bond. For Ryan and me, there was a kinship that transcended allegiance to our alma maters. It was a similar deep appreciation for how college football becomes almost like strands of our DNA. Ryan’s college football DNA extends a little past that of a typical fan, given that his father, Jerry, was one of the top game officials in the sport.
Ryan’s passion is not an irrationally rabid, paint-your-face, hate-every-wretched-breath-a-rival-sucks-into-his-greedy-lungs, smash-your-television, and tweet-“fire-the-coach”-after-every-loss fervor. It’s understanding how that sometimes over-the-top zeal dovetails with and mysteriously reflects the more rational deep devotion to the sport, and how it makes college football unique among all sports in America.
In 2019, we worked together on ESPN’s College Football 150 project titled The Greatest, in which we ranked everything—the top players, coaches, mascots, stadiums, moments, and everything in between. Ryan’s extraordinary grasp of why college football is so ingrained in our culture was evident. It wasn’t just knowing the stories. He has an uncanny ability to share them in a way that connects with people.
I’m also proud to be a small part of Ryan’s most important connection. We were still on the racing beat in 1998 when Ryan told me he wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Erica. But it had been a long-distance romance for a while, and his ring funds had taken a hit by going to visit her. I told him I knew a guy who could help. My father-in-law was in the jewelry business and helped Ryan expedite the engagement.
Twenty years later, I finally got a good look at the ring when our families ran into each other at Walt Disney World. He recounted the ring story to my wife with the warmth, sincerity, and self-effacing humor that are his trademarks as a reporter and a writer. Those qualities are captured perfectly as Ryan shares how college football has provided celebration and solace in Sidelines and Bloodlines: A Father, His Sons, and Our Life in College Football.
—Rece Davis is the host of College GameDay, ESPN’s flagship college football program. He also hosts the network’s on-site coverage of the College Football Playoff and has been a regular contributor to SportsCenter and other ESPN shows and platforms since he joined the network in 1995.
Prologue
One Last Time… For Real This Time
2009 BCS National Championship Coral Gables, Florida January 8, 2009
“You think we can get them to slow that clock down?”
My father spoke to me in a conversational, almost quiet tone. Well, as quiet and conversational as one can be while talking on the sideline of a football stadium surrounded by 78,466 other people. The game clock was ticking toward 00:00 in the 2009 BCS National Championship Game. To everyone else in the nation, that countdown was moving toward the end of college football’s 139th season and the coronation of the Florida Gators as champions, entering the final minutes of icing a 24–14 home-state victory over the Oklahoma Sooners.
But for four of us there in Dolphin Stadium that night, the end of the game meant the end of the officiating career of my father, Dr. Jerry Edward McGee, also known as the gray-haired guy with the big white “F” on the back of his black-and-white-striped jersey. After 404 college football games, 300 at the sport’s highest level, this one—the biggest one he’d ever worked—was going to be it.
Or so he’d promised. For real this time.
Dad’s officiating career had included two Rose Bowls, a pair of Army-Navy games, and two dozen postseason contests in all. Three of those games, including this one, had determined the national championship. But before this night on this stage, there had been much smaller games played in much smaller venues under much dimmer lights and under the gaze of exactly zero TV cameras. The first time he’d stepped onto a collegiate football field with a whistle was nearly 37 years earlier, at a small college game in Greensboro, North Carolina, between Emory and Henry and Guilford College. That day there were at best a few hundred people in attendance and maybe a few dozen more listening on AM radio. This night in South Florida, nearly 27 million Americans were watching on television.
From that first game to this last one, there had been two constants. First, my father was on the field. Second, there was one loudmouth guy also in attendance who’d made it his mission in life to remind my father that he was a blind idiot. No, it wasn’t the same guy. But it might as well have been. Like some sort of Dickensian Ghost of College Football Games Past, he was there as a proud representative of every man, woman, and child who’d ever shouted at Dad, a lifelong verbal assault stretched out over every game he’d ever worked. This guy screamed from the first row of Dolphin Stadium, convinced that the seven men in stripes had cost his beloved top-ranked Oklahoma team their eighth national title…because, you know, it couldn’t have possibly been the Sooners’ suddenly inept off
ense, gassed defense, two interceptions, or their inability to convert on third down.
No, it was the field judge’s fault.
“YOU STUPID ACC REFFFFF!”
Dad never heard him. Just as he never heard anyone at Guilford in 1972. He was focused on the next play. He was always focused on the next play. Even as he talked to me in that moment, his eyes never left the field. He was treating these final plays the same as he had the other 158 plays of the night, and the same as he’d handled every play in every single one of those 403 games before this one. He moved into position, employing second-nature mechanics that had become muscle memory, though as the years had ticked by and the game had sped up, that positioning had been adjusted to cover a much faster brand of football play and football players. He counted the Oklahoma defensive players on the field, one to 11. He awaited the snap. When it happened, he watched his zone, monitored the players who came into that zone, and managed it all accordingly.
Both quarterbacks in this game—Tim Tebow and Sam Bradford—were Heisman Trophy winners, the last two on a headcount of more than a dozen Heisman winners my father had shared a field with since 1982, from Bo Jackson and Eddie George to Gino Torretta and Charlie Ward. A few months later, eight players in this game would have their names called in the NFL draft. The following year, another 16 players from this game would be drafted. In all, more than two dozen players on these two rosters would go on to serve at least a little time on NFL rosters. Both head coaches, Florida’s Urban Meyer and Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops, are national title winners and future College Football Hall of Famers. The first time Dad shared a field with these two at the same time had been 14 years earlier and on a completely different coast, in San Diego’s Holiday Bowl, when Stoops was the defensive coordinator for Kansas State and Meyer was the wide receivers coach at Colorado State.
Florida was grinding along to run out the clock. On a first-down dash that essentially ended the game, quarterback Tim Tebow collided with umpire Tom Laverty, the official perilously positioned behind the defensive line on every play. Tebow—6’3”, 250 pounds—crashed into Laverty, a former collegiate offensive lineman who was nearly every bit as big as the quarterback. The impact was a large one, but both men popped up, though Laverty did so with a Tim Tebow cleat mark in his back.
“Ouch!” Dad said, watching the stadium video board for a replay of the pileup, which had happened in the middle of the field, 22 yards away from his post downfield. It might have looked like he was talking to no one in particular, or even muttering to himself. He was known to do that during games. But right now, he was speaking to me. “That’s why I like being down here.”
He turned his head so that I could see his smiling face from my vantage point on the sideline, standing a few feet behind him. I was covering the game as a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. I’d spent the first three and a half quarters in the cramped auxiliary press box, an unused skybox stuffed with extra stools for writers and their laptops. As per the usual press box rules, media members were allowed to descend to the sideline for only the final few minutes of the game. Usually, I was the last one down there, holding out to watch as much of the game as I could from the better vantage point up top. But tonight, I’d been the first sportswriter off the elevator, eager to stake out a position as close to my father as my press credentials and stadium security would allow.
Dad had spotted me immediately, and as the plays had moved up and down the field, I had moved with them, just off the shoulder of the field judge, separated only by the thick white painted sideline at our feet. I let him know I was there. “Hey, McGee!”
He turned to face me, but only halfway. He smiled.
“Well,” he said, tilting his head toward the scoreboard and referencing a month of pregame predictions of a video game shootout between Tebow and Sam Bradford, “I don’t think this one is going to be 52–50, do you?”
I laughed and shouted back. “If they’re going to do it, they’d better hurry up!”
The whistle blew. The ball was snapped. Dad launched into action. Another play. A few more seconds off the clock. Then the cycle started over again.
“You get to see your brother?” Dad asked.
“Yep, I went down and saw them at halftime,” I replied, pointing to where my younger brother, Sam, and Dad’s younger brother, my uncle Danny, were seated in the corner of the lower bowl, right behind where we were now. This was not the first time we had flown to Florida for a postseason game we believed would be Dad’s last. But this time, he promised, he was really done. We hadn’t been there for his first game in ’72; I was a baby and Sam had yet to be born. But there was no way we were missing his last one.
The people sitting around Sam and Danny, as usual, were the families of the other six members of the officiating crew. As the game entered the final minutes, the officials’ wives and children and siblings began to breathe easier. There had been no big controversial calls (no matter what the guy in the front row thought) and, more importantly, no one on the crew had gotten hurt. There had been a pause from the families when Laverty went down at midfield, but when he popped back up, they sighed their relief and the game went on.
“Good, I’m glad you got to see them for a minute.” Dad nodded as he talked. “That’s good.”
Whistle. Snap. Play run.
A fellow member of the media, waiting to storm the field as soon the game went final, tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to Dad. My friend wasn’t mad, but he was confused. He simply hadn’t seen a conversation like this one before. Chatting it up during a live college football game? Between a game official and some guy on the sideline? He knew this was my father and he knew this was my father’s final game. All my press box colleagues knew that, because I had a column in the current issue of ESPN The Magazine titled A tribute to my father, ACC field judge Jerry McGee.
“What the hell are you two doing?” he asked.
I reached out, squeezed his arm, and winked. “It’s all good, man. We’ve been having this conversation since I was a kid.”
We had. It was a sideline chat that started on November 12, 1983. That was the very first time I’d ever worn sideline credentials, at a contest between the universities of North Carolina and Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just turned 13 and was wielding the camera that Santa Claus brought me one year earlier. Sam, three years younger, was there, too. I got run over during the game-winning touchdown run and Sam got into trouble for running onto the field midgame. But we figured out how to keep coming back.
Those in-game chats continued for the next 25 years, as either Sam or I birddogged Dad along sidelines from Duke and West Point to Pittsburgh and Clemson’s Death Valley. That’s how we learned the game of football, watching from field level as our father made split-second decisions on Saturdays and then walked us through why he did or didn’t throw his penalty flag after those decisions were made. We learned the ever-changing college football rulebook in real-time, watching Dad’s games in person, watching grainy VHS recordings of those games, listening to him recite those rules aloud as he prepared for exams, and participating in living room walk-though demonstrations/explanations of what we’d just been taught from all of the above. “Okay, this is how the new halo rules will work on punts. Sam, you’re the punt returner. Ryan, stand here, you’re from the kicking team. Go get your mom. We need a second person for the return team…”
We learned the game of football so much differently than anyone else I knew. The only people I’ve talked to who seem to understand what I’m talking about when I explain it are the kids of coaches. It’s a childhood of Xs and Os, watching fathers spend their summers dissecting game film, knowing that every autumn weekend will never be free for other activities, and that every New Year’s holiday will (hopefully) be spent in a hotel and at pre-bowl game events, the reward for all of the hard work put into a (hopefully) successful regular season.
But e
ven those coaches’ kids weren’t taught what we, the children of officials, were.
What we learned was that there are never two teams on the field when the ball is kicked off. There are three. And that third team, the one in stripes, doesn’t arrive in a chartered jet. They ride in coach, sleep in a Holiday Inn Express, take a van to the stadium, and are cussed at along every step of the way. These days, with every game broadcast on television and every play of those games pushed through the prism of social media, the anonymity of their predecessors has long since vanished, and the criticism they receive is no longer limited to the hours surrounding the game itself. Now it never ends. For their efforts, they are handed a check for a few hundred dollars, one they can deposit during the commute to their day jobs on Monday morning.
Yet despite all of that, no one in that stadium each Saturday truly loves the experience more than that third team, the officials. They have to love it. Why else would they do it?
But that third team is not totally alone. They have their families. If you’re as fortunate as my brother and I were, then you get to feel like you are on that officiating team. We McGees, we’ve always been a close-knit family, but the strongest thread of our shared DNA has always been dusted with white sideline paint.
Sam once saved the day on the sidelines at the New Jersey Meadowlands. A chilling autumn downpour prevented Dad and his crew from filling out their penalty cards, the mandatory in-game log of the day’s fouls. The instant they would pull the cards from their pockets, they’d become waterlogged. So, Sam filled out their paperwork for them, scribbling blind with a pencil under a poncho. I can guarantee that you he knew the rules better than anyone else on that sideline, including most of the coaches from Duke and Rutgers, or any of the fans hiding under the lip of the upper deck. He was 14.
I once stood on the sidelines at Liberty University and received a question about my in-game chats with the field judge that day, too. “Excuse me, but are officials supposed to be talking with riff-raff during games?” The voice was booming, but pleasant. It was also, thankfully, joking. Reverend Jerry Falwell, the polarizing preacher, political figure, and founder of the school, was smiling in his three-piece suit, the evening news suddenly coming alive right before my eyes. “That’s Dr. McGee. He’s your father?” Falwell asked. I said yes. “Well then,” he said, feigning a reach for his wallet. “Maybe we can work out a deal for a timely pass interference.”