BATON ROUGE — LSU reserve quarterback T.C. McCartney will be featured on ESPN College GameDay on Saturday and the network’s Outside the Lines program on Sunday in a story that honors his late father, former Colorado quarterback Sal Aunese, 20 years after losing his battle with cancer.
ESPN College Gameday airs from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. CT Saturday. An extended version of the story will run on Sunday’s Outside the Lines at 8 a.m. CT on ESPN and again at 11 a.m. CT on ESPN News. An online companion piece authored by ESPN.com senior writer Tom Friend runs on the network’s E-Ticket line on Sunday morning.
Friend and ESPN came to Baton Rouge during the Tigers’ preseason camp to conduct on-camera interviews with McCartney and head coach Les Miles. The network was also on hand for LSU’s season-opener at Washington and visited with both Miles and McCartney during the Tigers’ Friday walkthrough.
Both Miles and Husky Stadium have added significance to the story. As an assistant coach at Colorado, Miles recruited McCartney’s father who would go on to have a brilliant career with the Buffaloes.
Sal Aunese won the Colorado starting quarterback job as a sophomore and passed for over 1,000 yards as a junior in 1988. However, in the spring of 1989, Aunese was diagnosed with a rare form of stomach cancer. On Sept. 23, 1989, he died at the age of 21. T.C. McCartney was just five months old.
The lasting image of the 1989 college football regular season took place in Husky Stadium. The Buffaloes honored Aunese by dropping to one knee on the field during pregame festivities a week after his death. Twenty years later, T.C. McCartney walked onto the field where the moment took place as the Tigers took on Washington in the season-opener.
“I think a lot of what keeps me going is continuing his legacy,” McCartney said in Friend’s story. “Finishing what he started, that’s what my whole football career, I’ve always thought about. He didn’t get to see it through, so maybe I’ll be able to get on the field and see it through one day.”