Where does the soul of college football reside? There’s no one answer, but a good place to start has flown every Saturday morning since 2004 high above hundreds of fans during ESPN’s College GameDay. Whether it’s on an active aircraft carrier, in freezing temperatures in Montana, or in enemy territory in Seattle, a crimson flag with a white Washington State logo dubbed Ol’ Crimson has been there. Later this season, it will hit a milestone for 300 straight appearances, but lately, Ol’ Crimson has found some company.
Oregon State alums Todd Butler, and Andy Lake were among the Beavers fans who had admired the Ol’ Crimson movement from afar and decided to see if they could replicate it. The idea for the Dam Flag was born, and a large Beavers logo emblazoned on a black or orange flag can now be seen right next to Ol’ Crimson during the show.
Andrew Wevers/USA TODAY Sports
Fans on both sides will tell you they have long been kindred spirits. Both are land-grant institutions that are the less sexy versions of their in-state rivals. Washington’s a big city state school with high academic standards and a history of Rose Bowls and national championships. Oregon is Nike U with a penchant for innovation that garners national attention. Then there is Wazzu in Pullman, which is closer to Idaho than Seattle and OSU in Corvallis. Now they’ll be left behind as their big brothers head to the Big Ten next year.
Realignment has created casualties of century-old rivalries and various traditions, but the most recent iteration of it has also created an immediate existential one to the long-term future of Washington State and Oregon State. They’re the only remaining members of the artist formerly known as the Pac-12, left on the vine by 10 other schools. When the two teams played in September, each mascot flew the other’s flag while being carted into the stadium and danced together at midfield.
Realignment decisions are made in board rooms by TV executives, school presidents, athletic directors and business consultants. Fans often feel they barely have a voice. So a group of Oregon State fans took it upon themselves to be heard.
“This is the darkest spot for me in OSU athletics,” says Ben Forgard, a lifelong Beaver fan and second-generation alum who runs the Dam Flag Twitter account. “Even though we went through 28 losing years, I'd rather go through that and be in the Pac-10 than be down to two. And so being down to two with somebody else, that makes a huge difference because then you have some camaraderie of somebody else who you're doing it with, you want each other to succeed. Our game, we jokingly called it the Pac-2 championship. Right? That's the friendliest rivalry game that we've ever had. Their band played our fight song at the beginning.”
While the Dam Flag folks are starting from scratch, the Ol’ Crimson organization is a well-oiled machine. In 2004, Washington State alum Tom Pounds showed up to a GameDay show in Austin with the original Ol’ Crimson. Two weeks later, the flag showed up at Wisconsin and a tradition was born that still endures. Now those at Wazzu are paying it forward by lending support to their Pac-2 brethren. While Lake and Butler were trying to get their flag campaign off the ground, Ol’ Crimson’s org had been working on its own to try and connect with the Oregon State athletic department before the season to try and get a flag to wave at GameDay for Week 1 in Charlotte. Their contact at OSU missed the shipping window by two minutes; it flew for the first time in Week 2 in Tuscaloosa. It was the first lesson in just how complicated the logistics are in this endeavor. Lake and Butler were eventually connected with Ol’ Crimson Booster Club coordinator CJ McCoy, and now they work together.
“I cannot say enough good things about Ol’ Crimson,” Forgard says. “They have been such a phenomenal support group for us, and have really given us just a lot of great advice and a lot of logistical support, just to help us get off the ground. We appreciate that a lot.”
By now, Ol’ Crimson has a large database. It no longer struggles when to go to a new place for GameDay, but a unique challenge is when the show goes back to a repeat location. You can only call on people so many times once they’ve done it once. There’s a devoted fan in Atlanta to take care of most of the locations in the southeast and he’s become the all-time flag-waver. But once, he couldn’t get to Tallahassee, and a WSU alum who works at Florida State was otherwise occupied that day. They had someone drive from Austin to do it. It underscores how professional the operation is.
“I don't let just anybody be the lead waver,” McCoy says. “Just because you reached out to me and said you're from WSU—great, but I'm going to find someone who I know has waved the flag before and is going to make certain that they get there. I'll put you on the crew and connect you with them, but I always have a lead waver every week that we ship the flag to and that person 99% of time they've done it before.”
Ol’ Crimson typically has two flags, a crimson one and a gray one. They’re still hand-sewn by Pounds and are typically 5-by-7. Pounds often sews someone’s name onto the flag for a dedication. The first gray one flown was dedicated to McCoy’s mother who had recently passed away, and he got to be the first one to wave it. A white flag Ol’ Crimson used to use was retired in honor of Cougars alum and former NFL player Steve Gleason, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease. Gleason has a saying “no white flags,” which is the calling card for his organization. So the white flag was retired and auctioned off to benefit Gleason’s foundation.
There’s no frequent flier status with FedEx, but in the early days Ol’ Crimson did have a Coug alum on the inside at FedEx who helped the movement. The problem was, however, FedEx would occasionally lose the flags while in transit. The most critical issue was the “last mile,” as it’s termed in the shipping industry, which is basically how packages get from the nearest shipping center to its actual destination, whether that means a store or a house. There’s an entire industry within the industry of last-mile shipping companies, but the fix the Ol’ Crimson folks have settled on is just shipping to a FedEx store and having the waver pick it up.
They switched to UPS for a time when the shipping company sponsored college sports but it didn’t completely solve the issue of losing flags. In 2015, with GameDay headed to Tucson, the tube the flag and its poles were shipped in got lost somewhere in Mississippi. (Two weeks earlier, McCoy had traveled to Bristol, Conn. and gifted ESPN an Ol’ Crimson that hangs in the on-campus cafe. It was dedicated to Randall Johnson, who designed the Cougar-head logo in 1936, and revised it in 1959 when Washington State College became Washington State University.)
The moment became a marketing opportunity when McCoy took advantage of a service called UPS critical for moments like this when a vital overnight shipment is needed. GameDay itself helped make a show of the moment the flag arrived on-sight just after 3 a.m. local time. But there was another backup plan that day.
“The truth is, I actually flew somebody out of Pullman with a flag. So we had actually multiple flags there,” McCoy says.
When UPS stopped sponsoring college sports, Ol’ Crimson switched back to FedEx, and another alum there helps them. McCoy declined to give exact financials of how much it costs per year to get the flag where it needs to go each week, noting it changes each year. There are also other costs involved beyond shipping one flag and pole 15 Saturdays a year.
If Pounds wants to go to a game, the org will pay to fly him out. There’s no discount for the shipping costs, which is where the booster club concept comes in, and underscores just how passionate people are about the tradition.
“We'll ship the flag in the offseason to people,” McCoy says. “We're certain that there's a flag buried with somebody somewhere because people will call us and say, ‘Hey, you know, this is really important to us. Could you send it to our event?’ Or just in this one case, there was a gentleman who unfortunately passed away in line of duty and they asked if we could send them the flags for the memorial service. And to this day, I never got that flag back. So there's every chance that they either still have it or he still has it.”
In 2018, when GameDay finally went to Pullman, they sent multiple members of the Ol’ Crimson board and multiple flags to contribute one of the more incredible scenes in the history of the show as dozens—if not hundreds—of flags flew behind the set.
Worth. The. Wait. pic.twitter.com/XJRUQ5hqyM
— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) October 20, 2018
But even doing this nearly 300 times, close shaves still happen—and sometimes that has nothing to do with shipping the flag. Once for a show at Notre Dame, the wavers left from Chicago late and nearly missed the start of the broadcast.
Now there are two shipments, as the Ol’ Crimson organization has been shipping the Oregon State flag as well.
The Dam Flag’s growing pains have been less shipping logistics and more finding people to wave the flag, although their pole did snap during one of their initial GameDay appearances because, as they found out, a 6-by-10 is a little too heavy (they’ve settled on 4-by-6).
The usual source for finding a waver so far has been a message board on BeaverBlitz.com. Pounds also used a message board back in the early 2000s as Ol’ Crimson was getting its movement off the ground. The site’s owner, Angie Machado, has been helping connect people to wave the flag at GameDay sets. McCoy says that Ol’ Crimson was planning to have their people wave the Oregon State flag during the GameDay at Duke, but a grad student there showed up and they got it figured out. Former OSU kicker Alexis Serna got in touch with a former teammate and found a Beaver for Week 3 at Notre Dame.
@yanni_demo (OSU football alum) helped represent in South Bend! pic.twitter.com/txwuLN6ygg
— Dam Flag (@thedamflag) October 7, 2023
Near the end of that show as the talent on stage was picking the Oregon State–Washington State game, Lee Corso referred to the game as the “no one wants us” bowl, a nod to the plight of each school looking for a home. That comment was misquoted after the game by Washington State coach Jake Dickert as “no one watches bowl” in a fiery postgame press conference in which Dickert made the point that the Cougars outrate multiple Big 12 programs and went after ESPN for the role of media companies in the realignment chaos that has his program in this spot. But his specific call out of Corso created a fiasco. Kirk Herbstreit and former Cougars quarterback Ryan Leaf went back-and-forth on X (formerly known as Twitter) as Leaf took it personally that GameDay hosts were apparently punching down regarding a situation that ESPN had a hand in creating.
And @CollegeGameDay is supposed to be a celebration of #CFB. Instead, they choose to make it a big joke, and everyone on the panel enables it. Just a bunch of wind socks. #CougsvsEverybody https://t.co/pp8XtZCUoy
— Ryan D Leaf (@RyanDLeaf) September 24, 2023
The next day, Dickert and Corso buried the hatchet on a phone call, and a few days later Dickert explained his frustration while also not walking the comments back. On the Sept. 30 GameDay, hosts Desmond Howard and Pat McAfee got their chances to respond after both flags were shown on camera, taking umbrage with a perceived attack on Corso.
McAfee then took things even further two days later on his own show, essentially saying Washington State fans should be grateful GameDay gives their program the platform. He said, in part:
“I went to West Virginia, I wish there was a WVU flag flying in the most prominent show in college football every single week and giving a full spotlight to it and then Lee Corso cracks a joke—that’s real by the way—he’s not making the decision, but it’s real, and then you start attacking Lee and then attacking Herbstreit. These people have done a lot for you, I think Washington State, and I don’t appreciate it,” McAfee said. “Now, I am just walking shit in the middle of that, but also like, bulls--- that you attacked Kirk Herbstreit the way you guys did as Kirk Hebstreit I think takes a lot of pride in what GameDay is, been there for 28 years, has a lot of say in that whole thing. And probably was a part of Yes, we need to keep the Washington State flag in there. So one time they don’t go ‘Oh Washington State’ you guys start getting petty and attacking? F--- off. That ain’t how this goes around here with me.”
Whether McAfee was playing up the feud for his own show as a pro wrestling-style heel or how much he means what he says is up for your own determination. ESPN declined comment on the situation to SI, and sources behind the scenes at GameDay regard the whole situation as a series of miscommunications. But it inflamed in both fanbases (and many others) a simmering rage at changes driven by the almighty dollar overlooking their passion and support of the sport—which is the entire reason Ol’ Crimson persists and Dam Flag began in the first place.
“You have Fox and you have ESPN, and they're the ones that are making these decisions and making these investments in other leagues, and certainly [school] presidents who are chasing the dollars,” McCoy says. “There is a bit of vitriol, warranted or unwarranted, I’ll leave that up to your readers to decide, but Washington State people are fairly sensitive about it because we didn't deserve this. And when people start to pick on the flag and the tradition of the Washington State flag and when folks don't want to make that investment to truly understand its purpose and the reason behind it you could understand why there’s sensitivity, right?”
There will be no boycott of the show by Ol’ Crimson or Dam Flag. Conscientious objection isn’t the point here. Both flags will continue flying behind the set for as long as they can find people to wave them and FedEx can cooperate. What they’re flying is—as Beavers fans like to say—built, not bought. It signifies that no matter what league they’re in, whether Pac-2 or Mountain West, they will be seen on the national stage. It’s a small 5x7 signifier of where the true soul of college sports lies as its future remains in tumult.
