Fox’s Big Noon Saturday concept was a stroke of genius for the network. There’s no denying its success when it comes to ratings and influence and allowing the network to break out from the pack and have its own premier window. There’s just one problem.
Everyone hates it.
Well, maybe not everyone. If you’re a Fox Sports employee like Joel Klatt, you love Big Noon. It’s brought the network ratings success and relevance and firmly placed Fox alongside ESPN as one of the major college football broadcasters. Aside from that brief window where they held BCS rights, Fox has never been a significant player in the college football world until Big Noon. But even Fox knows that what they are trying to accomplish and sell with the package is unpopular to say the least.
To be clear, college football fans and even the schools themselves have had an issue with Big Noon Saturday ever since it began several years ago. Nobody really wants to play a big game at 12 p.m. ET for several reasons. It’s an unfriendly start time to fans who want to tailgate all day, it’s a nightmare for students, the stadium energy and homefield advantage is not the same, and let’s just be honest – the aura of a primetime game on campus vastly exceeds an early afternoon kickoff.
But this year, the resistance against Big Noon has swelled to levels unseen before. To put it bluntly, it may be the single most toxic relationship between fanbase and broadcaster in all of sports.
Where else have you ever seen a fanbase openly chant f-bombs at one of their broadcasters? That’s exactly what happened at Happy Valley when Penn State fans chanted “f— Big Noon” at the College GameDay set. One wonders whether the Big Noon Kickoff set, with its much smaller crowd, heard them just a few hundred yards away.
The Penn State College GameDay crowd breaks into a “F— Big Noon” chant as the crew jokes about night games.
“I think they would prefer a little bit of a later start.” pic.twitter.com/8A1zQ4mVzG
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 2, 2024
Imagine this happening in any other context. Have you ever heard anyone chant “f– the NBA on TNT” or “f—” the MLB postseason package on TBS!” Have there been boycotts whipped up against CBS’s NFL coverage? Of course not.
Penn State fans were apoplectic that their iconic white out game wouldn’t be reserved for a Top 5 showdown with Ohio State, rather it’d be relegated to a game against unranked Washington a week later on Peacock.
But Penn State has nothing on what OSU fans are experiencing as Fox looks to the “world famous” Ohio State Buckeyes to almost exclusively carry the burden of Big Noon Saturday for the network.
When Ohio State vs Indiana was announced as a Big Noon game on Monday, the entire Buckeye Nation rebelled against it as it means Ohio State will end the season playing six straight noon kickoffs with five of them happening on Fox’s Big Noon Saturday.
But it’s not just that. Ohio State received just one primetime home game this year. It was against Western Michigan on Big Ten Network. In fact, all but four of their games this season will have been noon games on Fox or BTN. CBS televised the Buckeyes’ opener against Akron at 3:30 p.m. ET, NBC got their primetime showdown against Oregon at 8 p.m. ET, and Peacock had its annual OSU exclusive at Michigan State under the lights. Other than that, every other OSU game has been a noon kickoff, including this week on BTN at Wrigley Field against Northwestern.
Incredibly, Fox’s pregame show – Big Noon Kickoff – will have made four trips to Columbus this season, with nondescript games like Nebraska and Marshall joining Indiana and Michigan at the end of the season. But the pregame show’s strategy for selecting their broadcast sites is another topic for another day.
The biggest issue here is that Fox and its Big Noon timeslot have become vastly over-dependent on Ohio State to boost ratings. It’s the reality of the current Big Ten construction.
When the conference added four schools from the Pac 12 in Oregon, Washington, UCLA, and USC, it knew that it would take a lot of marquee games on the West Coast out of contention for that timeslot. Although you can’t put it entirely past Fox to eventually do a 9 a.m. PT kickoff in the future if it is desperate enough.
Who knows what Gus Johnson was dealing with on Saturday that led to such dispassionate and seemingly uninterested calls when Ohio State blew out Purdue. But it was symbolic of the complete and total disconnect that is currently happening. If the announcers can’t get excited for yet another Ohio State game at Big Noon, why should the fans?
If a 45-0 blowout against a 1-7 team with a seemingly detached Gus Johnson isn’t rock bottom and a signal that this isn’t working than what is?
Michigan’s fall back to earth is a big issue, as is the fact that Texas and Oklahoma moved to the SEC. Those are the three strongest brands that Fox had a relationship who could help bring some diversity to Big Noon Saturday. But not this year. If Michigan can’t bounce back quickly next season, Fox is really only looking at Ohio State and to a lesser extent, Penn State and Colorado, to carry the window. Indiana is the best story in college football, but is nowhere near the brand name and ratings draw the other traditional powerhouses and Deion Sanders are. What else is Fox supposed to do, put Purdue-Minnesota at noon? Illinois-Rutgers? A USC trip to Maryland?
The unfortunate truth is that in spite of the complaints and toxicity, this is what college football fans, especially those in Columbus, are stuck with. There’s no getting out of the Big Noon conundrum as the current contract runs through the 2029 season. There is no pressure that the Ohio State athletic department or the Big Ten commissioner can place on its broadcast partners to change anything. There’s no leverage, no power plays, nothing. If anything, CBS and NBC are the ones who should be filled with angst that the scarlet and gray scales appear to have been tipped so heavily in Big Noon’s favor this season however the network draft and selection process has played out.
Fox is not moving or altering Big Noon Saturday anytime soon. Because for the network, the creation of the window has already achieved all of its goals. The entire reason why Fox made Big Noon Saturday a thing was because nobody else was broadcasting national games at that time. The SEC on CBS owned the 3:30 p.m. ET window and ESPN/ABC put their best game of the week on in primetime. At noon, there were only regional contests that rarely had any national appeal and Fox could have it for themselves. Why would Fox ever tear down what they built up?
Big Noon is not going anywhere because that’s where the money is. In fact, Fox executives are already doubling down on the concept looking ahead to next season.
Last 25 Years of Ohio State-Penn State Games:
FOX Big Noon Games – 9.4 million viewers
All Other OSU-PSU Games – 7.3 million
Look forward to running it back next year. https://t.co/TvxPAMl84S
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) November 6, 2024
Big Noon Saturday is where Fox can make money. And it’s where the Big Ten schools can earn their money from Fox. The parties involved did not come together to create this broadcast window with fan preference and stadium atmosphere in mind, they did it for revenue — just like every other decision that has been made in this upside down world of college football where the Big Ten has 18 teams and schools in California play in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Ultimately, those in power know that no matter how many fans complain about noon kickoffs, or try to boycott, that they are going to watch anyways. And that’s really all that matters.
