By Jimmy Carlton Sportswriter Published Aug 31, 2016 at 1:02 PM

Get ready, Green Bay, Lee Corso's giant heads are coming, along with the rest of the ESPN College GameDay circus.

The Wisconsin Badgers open their season Saturday against the LSU Tigers at Lambeau Field, a marquee matchup at one of the most iconic football stadiums in America, and college football’s longest-running and most-celebrated pregame show will be bringing all of its zany, analys-ish entertainment to Titletown. 

There will be fans’ delightfully sophomoric signs, Kirk Herbstreit’s inevitable entreaty that "(insert player) must step up today" – let's just assume it'll be Corey Clement – and, of course, Corso’s giddy gimmick: the mascot headgear prediction. Thankfully, there is also still the preternaturally poised host, Rece Davis, holding the six-time Emmy Award-winning program together.

But besides the main show’s always amusing, at-times-informational appeal, fans in attendance and TV viewers will also enjoy a couple of local angles on the broadcast. Joining Davis, Herbstreit, Corso and David Pollack is fellow analyst Desmond Howard, the former Packers kick returner who helped Green Bay to the Super Bowl XXXI title.

It will be a homecoming of sorts for Howard, who was named MVP of that game for gaining 244 all-purpose yards – a Super Bowl record – and scoring a touchdown in the Packers’ win over the New England Patriots. After leaving Green Bay following that 1996 season, Howard returned to the Packers in 1999 but was cut midway through the year.

Despite his brief time with the team, Howard recently posted a video to his Facebook page, putting on his old No. 81 jersey, recalling "very special memories" and saying, "what I really remember about Lambeau Field (is) the fans."

But Howard isn’t the only member of the ESPN College GameDay crew making a homecoming. Contributor Jen Lada, a Marquette University graduate who spent seven years as a reporter on WITI FOX6, is entering her first season on the show.

The locally well-liked Lada left Milwaukee in 2013 to work for Comcast SportsNet in Chicago for two years, before joining ESPN in 2015. For The Mothership, she contributes content to "Mike & Mike," "SportsCenter," "Baseball Tonight" and the company’s digital platforms.

In a Twitter post two weeks ago, Lada sounded pretty happy about returning to Wisconsin.

College GameDay runs from 9 a.m. to noon every Saturday on ESPN during the football season. When the show airs in front of the Brown County Arena on Oneida Street, it will mark the first time it’s been in Green Bay and the sixth time it’s originated from this state – the last being Wisconsin’s 48-17 win over Nebraska in 2011.

The visit to Lambeau Field marks the third consecutive year, and eighth in the last nine years, that GameDay begins the season at a neutral site. Green Bay is the 74th different city for the show.

"Lambeau Field is hailed as a football shrine and is as special of a venue as the game of football has to offer," said Lee Fitting, ESPN senior coordinating producer. "It is an honor to be able to stage College GameDay from Lambeau as we kick off this opening weekend filled with top-caliber games."

This is the second straight season the Badgers open with a high-profile, nationally broadcast game against an SEC powerhouse. In 2015, they fell 35-17 in Arlington, Texas, to Alabama, which went on to win the national championship. This year, they face No. 5 LSU, which features new defensive coordinator Dave Aranda, who held that position at Wisconsin the previous three seasons.

The Wisconsin-LSU game will start at 2:30 p.m. CT, and the new trio of Steve Levy, Brian Griese and Todd McShay will be on the call for ABC.

Lada, a feature reporter on College GameDay, was profiled in a 2013 OnMilwaukee farewell story. 

All-time, the Badgers are 4-8 in College GameDay contests. Including bowls and SEC Championship games, LSU is 15-9 with the ESPN gang in attendance. This will be the sixth time GameDay has been to a matchup between the SEC and Big Ten, with SEC teams so far having gone 5-0. Saturday’s show, part of ESPN’s Kickoff Weekend, is the first GameDay broadcast of the season.

Corso, a former coach, has been at ESPN since GameDay’s inception in 1987. The sprightly 81-year-old, who calls nearly everyone "sweetheart" – even his frequent faux-nemesis Herbstreit, with whom he usually disagrees – will make his standard, end-of-show headgear prediction.

Since past performance always indicates future results, especially when it comes to the calculative exercise of wearing a mascot head as a way to choose the winner of a football game, let’s take a look at some stats, as provided by ESPN: Corso has made 276 headgear predictions since he introduced the feature in 1996. He’s 12-4 when picking LSU and 5-3 when picking against the Tigers; as for the Badgers, he’s 2-2 when picking them and 4-2 when picking against them.

The Badgers, who finished 10-3 and ranked No. 21 last year after beating USC in the Holiday Bowl, enter their second season under head coach Paul Chryst. After losing Aranda to LSU, Wisconsin hired former Trojans defensive coordinator Justin Wilcox for its job. The defense boasts linebackers Jack Cichy and Vince Biegel, the latter of whom is on the Bednarik, Nagurski and Butkus Award watchlists. The Badgers’ offense is coordinated by Joe Rudolph, who has Clement – the highly touted running back on the preseason Maxwell and Doak Walker Award watchlists – but a major question mark at quarterback.

For the first time since 2009, Wisconsin was unranked in both the Associated Press and Coaches' preseason top 25 polls. 

Jimmy Carlton Sportswriter

Born in Milwaukee but a product of Shorewood High School (go ‘Hounds!) and Northwestern University (go ‘Cats!), Jimmy never knew the schoolboy bliss of cheering for a winning football, basketball or baseball team. So he ditched being a fan in order to cover sports professionally - occasionally objectively, always passionately. He's lived in Chicago, New York and Dallas, but now resides again in his beloved Brew City and is an ardent attacker of the notorious Milwaukee Inferiority Complex.

After interning at print publications like Birds and Blooms (official motto: "America's #1 backyard birding and gardening magazine!"), Sports Illustrated (unofficial motto: "Subscribe and save up to 90% off the cover price!") and The Dallas Morning News (a newspaper!), Jimmy worked for web outlets like CBSSports.com, where he was a Packers beat reporter, and FOX Sports Wisconsin, where he managed digital content. He's a proponent and frequent user of em dashes, parenthetical asides, descriptive appositives and, really, anything that makes his sentences longer and more needlessly complex.

Jimmy appreciates references to late '90s Brewers and Bucks players and is the curator of the unofficial John Jaha Hall of Fame. He also enjoys running, biking and soccer, but isn't too annoying about them. He writes about sports - both mainstream and unconventional - and non-sports, including history, music, food, art and even golf (just kidding!), and welcomes reader suggestions for off-the-beaten-path story ideas.