ESPN's Rece Davis
SI Media With Jimmy Traina
Sports Illustrated
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2025
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Episode 584 of "SI Media With Jimmy Traina" features an interview with "College GameDay" host, Rece Davis.
Davis reminisces about being at ESPN for 30 years, his early days on ESPN2 and his time as a "SportsCenter" anchor.
In addition, Davis, who has now been the host of "GameDay" for 10 years, talks about what it was like to replace Chris Fowler, his favorite Lee Corso memory, whether he cares about "GameDay" ratings, why he stayed at ESPN instead of leaving for Fox, whether he thinks he can challenge his co-hosts and the most difficult thing about hosting "GameDay."
Other topics discussed with Davis include the claim that ESPN has an SEC bias, calling Bill Belichick's first game at North Carolina and the aftermath, the Lane Kiffin saga, how he'd fix the college football playoff.
Following Davis, Sal Licata from WFAN and SNY joins Jimmy for their weekly "Traina Thoughts" segment. This week, Sal gives an update on his WFAN status, the fellas talk about their Thanksgivings, look ahead to a monster NFL week, react to Spotify's list of the top 10 podcasts of 2025 and discuss some content creators.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome everyone to SI Media with Jimmy Traynor. |
| 0:05.5 | Thank you so much for listening. |
| 0:07.1 | Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. |
| 0:08.9 | We have an excellent episode this week. |
| 0:10.6 | First time for me here on SI Media with Jimmy Traynor. |
| 0:13.6 | We have Maurice Davis from College Game Day. |
| 0:16.2 | ESPN, obviously a lot of college football stuff going on with the playoff, |
| 0:23.1 | Lane Kiffin. But it's really a lot about college football stuff going on with the playoff lane kiffin but it's really a lot about reese's career 30 years at ESPN 10 years at game day working that show but we do get into |
| 0:29.0 | the college football topics as well and then we do have sal lakata and train of thoughts following |
| 0:34.7 | the interview with rice davis some of you may have seen some news about Sal. |
| 0:38.3 | So you can listen to Sal saying his own words. What's going on there in that segment? |
| 0:42.9 | All right. Before we get to it, just a quick reminder. If you missed the show last week, we put out a show on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, then the other holiday. |
| 0:52.4 | So if you missed it, we had ESPN president Burke Magnus on the pod. A lot of news came out of that. And if you missed it, give that a listen with ESPN President Burke Magnus, got into a million topics there on ESPN. The week before that, Al Michaels and Richard Dyche were on the podcast and Kyle Brandt was on the pod a couple of weeks ago as well. So if you missed any of those, go into the archives, give them a listen, subscribe slash follow. Siamedia with Jimmy Trana. And if you want to leave a review on Apple or send an email, I will read it and I do appreciate it. All right. Let's get to it. Reese Davis, followed by Salicada and Trayna. All right here, right now. On SI Media with |
| 1:30.6 | Jimmy Traynor. All right, joining me now first time on the SI Media podcast. Travis Deed hasn't |
| 1:36.9 | happened sooner, but college football is front and center right now. And there's been a lot going on so who better to talk to then |
| 1:45.4 | the host of college game day reese davis how's it going everything's going great jimmy how are you |
| 1:51.7 | um well thanks for asking and uh a lot to get into here at college football i you know obviously the lane |
| 1:58.4 | kiffin thing we've got the playoff. |
| 2:08.7 | But I have to say in doing research for this interview, all I want to talk about is I never knew that your first name was not Reese and it was William. |
| 2:10.5 | It is. |
| 2:13.3 | I was named after my grandfather. |
| 2:14.4 | I was sort of. |
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