Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit and the rest of the ESPN College GameDay gang are heading to Happy Valley a little early this year.

For one week this April, the crew of ESPN College GameDay, the television sports network's college football preview show, will visit State College as part of a five-college tour that will also include Oklahoma, Iowa, Notre Dame and Ohio State to film segments on each team's spring football practice. Footage from each school's practice will be filmed during the day and will be presented in conjunction with a live GameDay broadcast on the network's popular daily sports recap show, SportsCenter.

"[ESPN] contacted us and indicated that they had an interest in going to five schools during one particular week in April, and they wanted Penn State to be one of those five schools," Penn State Assistant Athletic Director for Communications Jeff Nelson said. "It won't be a full regular GameDay program like in the fall. It will essentially be the three anchors at the practice."

Nelson said that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno approved the ESPN production of the team's spring drills.

Mac Nwulu, a senior publicist at ESPN, confirmed that Penn State is one of five schools being visited by the GameDay crew for the SportsCenter segment in April. He also said that there were no specific details regarding what exactly would be filmed or what topics for the stories on Penn State would be during the show's stay in State College.

"Whatever we do, we do with the cooperation from the other schools," Nwulu said. "Hopefully someone like JoePa will be available to do something live. We're going to ask for a whole lot more than we can get. [The production staff] needs to figure out what to request from each school's [sports information director]."

The show's topic for each school may not even be finalized until the day of filming.

"We'll ask for everything that is newsworthy," Nwulu said.

College GameDay has rotating hosts, including the likes of Corso and Herbstreit. Both have previous college football experience. Corso is the former head football coach of Louisville, while Herbstreit played quarterback for Ohio State. Nwulu said that the third host will likely be Chris Fowler, but it will all depend on each anchor's schedule.