E. J. Borghetti, media relations director for the University of Pittsburgh, a job Mr. Cook, once held, confirmed the death. Mr. Cook had had diabetes, heart disease and other ailments.

In 1982, Sports Illustrated called Mr. Cook "arguably the country's leading authority on college football," and his expertise and exposure only grew over the next two decades. He found his widest audience as a studio commentator before Saturday afternoon games. In recent years, he was on a weekly ESPN podcast.

For all his rumpled appearance and eccentric manner (which he cultivated), Mr. Cook was widely respected and influential. Bob Smizik, a sports columnist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote in 2006 that Mr. Cook could place a phone call and make a deserving player an all-American.

His commentary was sprinkled with historical references — to Churchill and Stalin, say — and truths wrapped in humor. Responding to complaints about the length of games, he agreed, saying they lasted longer than marriages. He said colleges spent more money promoting candidates for the Heisman Trophy than the Pentagon spends for toilets.

His most famous line, oddly enough, concerned baseball. When Iran released the American hostages in 1981, Mr. Cook had a quick response on hearing that the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, was giving them lifetime passes to major league games: "Haven't they suffered enough?"

Carroll Hoff Cook was born in Boston on Sept. 1, 1931, and his family moved to Pittsburgh when he was a child. Friends called him Beano, borrowing from Boston's nickname, Beantown. As a teenager he hitchhiked to New York to see the Army-Michigan game, and to Philadelphia for the Army-Navy game.

He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1954, served two years in the Army and worked as Pitt's sports publicist for the next decade. The athletic director who hired him assuaged Mr. Cook's initial nervousness by saying, "No matter how bad you screw up, Beano, they are still going to kick off at 1 p.m."

"That put it in perspective," Mr. Cook said.

At Pitt, he built a national reputation for telling the unvarnished truth. "I won't even lie for Pitt," he told the trade magazine Editor & Publisher in 1963.

"He has always been an enigma in the field of press agentry," the magazine said. "He is about as forthright as a bayonet, and writers respect him as the most honest, forthright man in this bizarre business."

He added to his reach, independent of Pitt, by writing and syndicating a weekly column of interviews with famous athletes around the nation.

His most audacious publicity stunt at Pitt was never pulled off. He had the idea of posing Pitt's star basketball player alongside Jonas Salk, who had developed his polio vaccine at Pitt. His proposed caption: "The world's two greatest shot makers." Dr. Salk refused to go along.

After leaving Pitt in 1966, Mr. Cook worked in corporate and news positions for CBS, ABC, Mutual Radio and the Miami Dolphins before settling at ESPN.

But his years at Pitt were never forgotten. In one tale he often told, as recounted by Sports Illustrated, Mr. Cook received a phone call one day from a woman asking for a copy of the roster of the Pitt football team. Mr. Cook said she should wait until the squad was cut, to 75 or 80 players from the original 120. "Otherwise it's really a waste of your time," he said.

But the woman demanded the roster immediately. He asked why. "Because," she said, "I want to sleep with everybody on the Pitt football team."

Mr. Cook gasped, but rallied. "Well," he said, "in alphabetical order, starting at guard ... Cook, Beano."