Big Noon Kickoff picks embarrassing location

In the battle for Saturday morning college football road show supremacy, there’s only two programs that matter. Apologies to SEC Nation and B1G Tailgate . ESPN’s College GameDay and Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff have spent the past several years vying for the eyeballs of college football fans as they wake up from their Friday night hangovers.

And how that sentence was written should give you a hint about which show is perceived as superior. ESPN’s College GameDay and Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff .

Big Noon Kickoff is always the and . And rightfully so. College GameDay has a track record dating back to 1987, and started its iconic road show format in 1993. Conversely, Big Noon Kickoff is relatively new to the scene, having made its debut just five years ago in 2019. The fact that the two shows are even compared as much as they are is a testament to the success that Fox has had. They took on Goliath and have (so far) lived to tell the tale.

But in the subjective world of sports media criticism, perception can often be reality. And there’s no doubt Big Noon Kickoff suffers from a perception problem.

Why? Some would argue that it’s the cast. GameDay has rocked with the same core group for nearly a decade, and when they’ve supplemented, it’s to add superstars like Pat McAfee or Nick Saban. For its part, Big Noon has also stuck with the same core for most of its run. But Rob Stone, Matt Leinart, Brady Quinn, and Urban Meyer don’t have quite the gravitas of Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard, and Lee Corso.

The cast alone doesn’t tell the whole story, however. One of the common knocks from fans regarding Big Noon is Fox’s insistence on traveling to games that will later air on its own network (typically at Noon). It’s hard to blame a network for wanting to promote its own properties, but occasionally the decision can make the show seem unserious, especially when it wants to be considered in the same regard as its competitor on ESPN.

This week, Big Noon Kickoff is traveling to Provo, Utah for a game between unranked Arizona and No. 14 BYU. In doing so, Fox passed up on the Red River Rivalry featuring No. 1 Texas and No. 18 Oklahoma (3:30 p.m. on ABC), a top-five Big Ten tilt between No. 2 Ohio State and No. 3 Oregon (7:30 p.m. on NBC), and a high-octane SEC game between No. 9 Ole Miss and No. 13 LSU (7:30 p.m. on ABC). On the other hand, College GameDay will be live from Eugene, Oregon for a game with massive Big Ten and College Football Playoff implications.

Fox’s and ESPN’s respective decisions get at the heart of the difference between the two shows. One serves as a promotional vehicle for a network, and the other serves as a comprehensive pregame show for an entire sport.

Dating back to the start of the 2021 season, the year where Big Noon Kickoff began regularly taking its show on the road, ESPN has brought College GameDay to games that would not air on an ESPN network 18 times, or for about 40% of its regular season shows. In that same time span, Fox has taken Big Noon Kickoff to games airing on a network other than Fox just twice, or about 4% of the time.

That discrepancy in it of itself isn’t indefensible . If there’s two or three strong match-ups in a given week, it makes sense to choose the one that airs on your network. Certainly, there’s also an element of not wanting to go to the same location as the other show so you don’t suppress the in-person audience for your own.

Perhaps then, a more fair measure of location decision would be how many people actually tuned into the game you went to. Out of the 44 weeks of regular season games measured from 2021 until last week, 19 times more people watched the game that GameDay attended, 16 times more people watched the game that Big Noon attended, and 9 times the two shows attended the same game.

Those figures don’t seem all that supportive of the narrative that Big Noon regularly goes to weaker games. While the split is still in ESPN’s favor, it’s relatively even. It should be noted, three of GameDay ‘s “wins” came in weeks that Big Noon did not travel during the 2021 season, while four of Big Noon ‘s “wins” came in weeks that GameDay attended an FCS game that was not measured by Nielsen. Essentially a wash.

However, if one looks at the average viewership for those games, the scales tip back in ESPN’s favor. Since 2021, the regular season games that College GameDay chose to attend have averaged an audience of 7.31 million viewers. Games attended by Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff averaged an audience of just 6.41 million viewers, about 12% less than GameDay ‘s choices.

Still, while these stats would indicate GameDay has a slight edge in picking the better game to travel to, they’re not so egregiously bad that it would seem like Big Noon is embarrassing itself with its choices. Why then, is there this perception that Big Noon often opts for games it has no business attending?

It’s because when Big Noon chooses to forego the week’s biggest game for a game that will air on Fox, Big Noon ‘s game loses badly head-to-head with GameDay . Five times since 2021, the game that Big Noon Kickoff travels to has drawn at least five million fewer viewers than the game College GameDay attended.

In Week 5 of this season, Big Noon attended unranked Colorado against unranked UCF while College GameDay went to No. 2 Georgia against No. 4 Alabama. The viewership gap? Over seven million.

Last season, Big Noon opted for No. 23 Kansas State against No. 7 Texas instead of No. 14 LSU against No. 8 Alabama. The viewership gap? Nearly six million. Also last season, Big Noon attended No. 16 Oklahoma against unranked Cincinnati rather than No. 6 Ohio State against No. 9 Notre Dame. The viewership gap? Over seven million.

In 2022, Big Noon opted to attend unranked Texas Tech against No. 7 TCU while GameDay attended No. 1 Tennessee against No. 3 Georgia. The viewership gap for that one? Over ten million! Lastly, also in 2022, Big Noon attended No. 10 Penn State against No. 5 Michigan the same week that GameDay attended No. 3 Alabama versus No. 6 Tennessee. The viewership gap for this week was just over five million, though the decision to attend another top-10 game is very defensible.

At no time, however, did the game ESPN’s College GameDay attended ever have five million fewer viewers than a game Big Noon Kickoff attended. The exception is two times when GameDay chose to attend FCS games that were not measured by Nielsen. One such FCS game went against No. 3 Michigan versus unranked Maryland on Big Noon that attracted 5.43 million viewers (hardly a must-watch). The other game was No. 2 Ohio State against No. 13 Penn State in 2022 which averaged 8.27 million viewers. In either case, it’s unlikely GameDay would’ve lost by more than five million viewers if they had attended a Nielsen-measured FBS game.

What’s the common thread in these weeks where the GameDay game beats out the Big Noon game by so much? Out of the five instances that GameDay attended a game that drew five million more viewers than the game Big Noon attended, four of them aired on non-ESPN networks. As such, College GameDay , in sacrificing some level of self-promotion by attending games airing on other networks, affords itself a level of legitimacy that Big Noon Kickoff cannot claim.

As much as Fox would like to suggest that Big Noon Kickoff is a legitimate contender to College GameDay by issuing press releases on the rare occasion when it beats ESPN’s show head-to-head, the comparison is wholly unserious. Without even mentioning the ratings chicanery that makes a Big Noon win sometimes possible, the show itself neglects large swaths of the college football landscape.

While GameDay offers a holistic view of the sport by regularly traveling to schools in every power conference, along with top FCS schools and HBCUs, Big Noon has attended just three games since 2021 that weren’t hosted by a Big Ten or Big 12 school. Two games in South Bend, Indiana for independent Notre Dame, and one game at Cincinnati of the American Athletic Conference. The show that claims it’s on the same playing field as College GameDay has gone three-and-a-half seasons without traveling to an SEC or ACC contest. Let that sink in.

So when we look at this week’s slate, history seems destined to repeat itself. College GameDay will be attending a top-5 matchup airing on another network, while Big Noon Kickoff will be attending a Fox game that’s barely on anyone’s radar. It may only happen one or two times a year, but viewers notice when a network shows a pattern of decision making that doesn’t serve the fan. No offense to the BYU crowd who will undoubtedly come out in full force for Big Noon on Saturday, but this isn’t a game deserving of the road show treatment. And Saturday’s viewership figures will show that.

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