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Fort Worth: Are you ready for some ‘GameDay’?

August 29,2014

Reposted from the Star Telegram

BY BILL HANNA
billhanna@star-telegram.com

FORT WORTH — For ESPN’s College GameDay, the road to the national championship begins and ends in Fort Worth.

Beginning Friday and continuing Saturday, the popular college football pregame show will broadcast from Sundance Square Plaza, where workers put the finishing touches on the set Thursday.

Big crowds are expected Saturday morning for the three-hour GameDay, a preview of the Florida State-Oklahoma State game at A&T Stadium in Arlington.

“We’re expecting anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 fans,” Sundance Square spokeswoman Tracy Gilmour said. “We know that the Florida State and Oklahoma State bands and cheerleaders will be here, and we have big contingents coming from UNT and SMU. Everybody wants to come out and show their colors.”

The party in Sundance Square, which includes taping some segments Friday morning and airing College Football Live that afternoon, is just the beginning of a season when Dallas-Fort Worth finds itself at the center of the college football universe.

Besides the usual offerings from the University of North Texas, SMU and TCU, six college football games will be hosted at AT&T Stadium, including the AT&T Cotton Bowl on Jan. 1 and the first College Football Championship Game on Jan. 12.

ESPN will return to Sundance Square during the week leading up to the national title game.

“We kind of dreamed about this for many years,” said Tommy Bain, chairman of the Stadium Events Organizing Committee, which was created by the Dallas Cowboys, the Cotton Bowl and AT&T Stadium to lure the big game to Arlington.

“I would call it a 15-year story,” said Bain, past chairman of the Cotton Bowl. “It really goes back to the end of the Southwest Conference when we no longer had a champion and we did not get selected to be in the BCS bowl mix. We had a vision. We had a desire for the whole North Texas region to get back to the top of college football.