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You may know Will Ferrell best from his various film and TV roles, but there once was another unlikely place you might have seen him on your screen: ESPN.
The Anchorman star joined fellow Saturday Night Live alum Ego Nwodim on a recent episode of her Thanks Dad with Ego Nwodim podcast for a wide-ranging chat, including bonding over both attending the University of Southern California as non-performance majors.
While Nwodim studied biology, Ferrell majored in sports information during the program's brief tenure at USC before it was "scrapped after 10 years." Rather than simply sports journalism, Ferrell said the major could lead one to being a sports information director who could be in charge of sports media.
"Like a chief marketing officer. You had all the interviews with the players and the coaches, do all this stuff. So you could be either a sports information director or you could be a print journalism or you could be broadcast," he said. "So I was going to be on ESPN. That was my plan."
Ferrell, who played a lot of sports in high school while watching his dad be a "struggling working musician," landed on that career as a "best of both worlds" move to combine his desire for a stable job and doing something he really enjoyed. It wasn't until he was done with school that he saw his first show at improv and sketch comedy theater The Groundlings in Los Angeles that something clicked and he chose to follow a new path and pursue comedy.
"I was like, OK, I'm not going to do sports. I don't want to be a newscaster. I want to be like Chevy Chase. I want to pretend to be a newscaster," he said. "So that's how I got derailed. Luckily."
Follow along with new episodes of Thanks Dad with Ego Nwodim or catch up on what you might have missed at iHeart.com.