Pat McAfee making comments about "Big Noon Kickoff" on "College GameDay." Pat McAfee making comments about “Big Noon Kickoff” on “College GameDay.” (Awful Announcing on X.)
College FootballESPNFoxBy Andrew Bucholtz on

This week has the unusual situation of both ESPN’s College GameDay and Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff being at the same game, No. 3 Penn State hosting No. 4 Ohio State. It’s just the second time this year that’s happened (both were at Texas-Michigan on Sept. 7), and the two sets are very close to each other in Happy Valley. And, near the start of GameDay, that led to panelist Pat McAfee taking a shot at the lack of crowd for Big Noon at that point:

It should be noted that this comment came almost an hour before Big Noon Kickoff began, as it’s a two-hour show versus GameDay‘s three-hour runtime. So the crowds at that particular time may not have been the most accurate comparison, especially with the sets so close it’s easy to walk from one to the other.

Still, it does seem likely that GameDay will pull in the bigger crowd. And that’s especially true with many associating Big Noon with the noon kickoff for this game that’s drawn particular complaints (and even calls from some fans to boycott the Fox show). But Big Noon did wind up with its own notable audience here:

But there were also anti-Big Noon chants from fans at GameDay, after “Stanford” Steve Coughlin’s discussion of Wisconsin-Iowa being a night game and after McAfee talking up night games and riling up the crowd, who broke into a profane chant against the other show:

Technically, it’s really the Big Noon Saturday window rather than the Big Noon Kickoff pregame show that’s to blame for the kickoff time, as the show has gone to some games that started later. (And Fox also wasn’t obligated to put this game at noon; they have a 3:30 slot they could have used, which they instead used for No. 17 Kansas State – Houston.) But, hey, the anti-Big Noon chant can cover both the pregame show and the game window. And this kickoff time is about Fox’s strategy to pump that noon window, including with the pregame show (which takes quite a different approach from GameDay, especially in terms of locations, which usually focus on Fox’s games more than the sport as a whole).

The on-air shots at Big Noon here are interesting, both from McAfee and from the fans. There’s certainly been a Big Noon-GameDay rivalry at times, especially while Big Noon was launching in 2019 and especially while it was getting close to GameDay in certain ratings segments that year. And that even led to both networks’ PR teams fighting a war over media outlets’ ratings analysis.

That rivalry seemed to die down a bit afterwards once Big Noon became more established (but also once it became clear it wasn’t going to compete with GameDay in total audience week-in and week-out). But it flared up a bit last year, especially around ESPN no longer having Big Ten rights and Fox doubling down on that conference. Still, even situations that set up well for Big Noon didn’t lead to outright ratings wins, and the show has seemed to be fine with doing what it does, promoting Fox games (and especially that noon window) and getting a decent audience in its own right. So the rivalry has seemingly been on simmer at the most most of the time.

But that changed this week. And that’s partly from this rare case of both shows being at the same location (this happened twice last year in addition to the aforementioned Texas-Michigan game this year), and the shows being so close together. There’s also that strong anti-noon sentiment, which even led to those boycott calls from some Nittany Lions fans in complaint about that kickoff time. And then there’s the personality of McAfee, known for playing to and riling up crowds. All of that made for more show-on-show criticism, at least from the ESPN side, than we usually see.

[Awful Announcing on X]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz