The calendar turning to August means college football is tantalizingly close, with the first game of the 2025 season kicking off later this month.
And if fall training camps beginning this week weren’t enough of an indication of the impending end of the summer sports doldrums, ESPN gave fans another cue that their long, agonizing wait is almost over.
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The network unveiled the song that will accompany much of its college football game coverage this season: “don’t wait run fast” by Machine Gun Kelly, with ESPN pairing the tune with a series of highlights and crowd shots from last season as part of a hype video.
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What may seem like a small, trivial detail is anything but for college football fans.
For those who are planted on their couch in front of the television all day every fall Saturday — to say nothing of the fans who just tune in to watch games involving their favorite team on an ESPN network — they’ll hear the song dozens of times over the course of the season, making it an oddly integral part of their game day experience. Memories of those songs can linger. More than a decade later, Fall Out Boy’s “Centuries,” ESPN’s anthem for the 2014 season, is still a meme among college football fans.
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The reaction to ESPN’s song choice has been mixed, to put it generously.
Like most people, sports fans are creatures of habit who are prone to bristle at anything new, even something as innocuous as a theme song for a television show. Social media wasn’t around when John Tesh’s “Roundball Rock” was unveiled as the theme song for the NBA on NBC, but it’s a safe bet there were people who didn’t care for the now-iconic tune.
The artist behind the anthem is also ripe for blowback. While commercially successful, Machine Gun Kelly was never critically regarded as a particularly good rapper and was effectively bullied out of the genre shortly after an ill-advised decision to start a beef with Eminem. He has since rebranded himself as a pop punk musician. The song that will appear on ESPN broadcasts this season is from his upcoming album, “lost americana.”
It marks the third consecutive year ESPN has turned to a former rapper for its college football anthem, with Jelly Roll and Post Malone occupying the role in 2024 and 2023, respectively.
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A healthy portion of the feedback to Machine Gun Kelly’s song was negative, though a number of users on social media and Reddit got a laugh out of the song’s line about being pulled over “doing 135” coinciding with a player in the highlight video from Georgia, a program whose players’ traffic offenses have been well-documented over the past several years.
One Redditor described the song as a “big win for deaf people” while another theorized the song selection could be “a ploy for Eminem to bury him again and use that song as the anthem.”
For others, though, the release of the video signaled college football’s almost here, which is reason enough for excitement, regardless of what song’s playing in the background.
ESPN’s college football coverage for the 2025 season will begin August 23 with Iowa State and Kansas State facing off in Dublin, Ireland, in Week Zero.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ESPN unveils Machine Gun Kelly song as its 2025 college football anthem
