Big Noon Kickoff

Did You Know?

• The first episode garnered 838,000 viewers, a 0.8 rating.
• A special two-hour edition leading into the Michigan-Ohio State game on November 30, 2019, received a series-high 1.6 overnight rating, beating College GameDay's 1.54 rating in its time slot for the first time.
• Charles Woodson joins the show on select weeks, most notably if Michigan is featured.

History

In the 2013 season, Fox aired a college football pre-game show on its newly launched Fox Sports 1 channel, Fox College Saturday. The program was unable to compete with ESPN's College GameDay, sustaining an average viewership of 70,000, and was cancelled after a single season. Its role was supplanted by the Friday-night edition of Fox Sports Live. Fox introduced the Big Noon Saturday window for its college football coverage in the 2019 season; the network had aired occasional noon kickoffs before, including the Michigan–Ohio State rivalry after acquiring the Big Ten's primary football rights in 2017, and those games were among Fox's top-viewed in the 2018 season. Fox positioned the timeslot as featuring one of its flagship games of the day, aiming to boost ratings by avoiding competition with CBS's featured SEC game at 3:30 p.m. and ABC's primetime game. Big Noon Kickoff was introduced as a pre-game show for this new window. Sports Illustrated described the show as being 'built around' Urban Meyer, who retired as Ohio State head coach after the 2018 season and had previously been an ESPN analyst. Meyer prepared for the role by studying clips of Fox NFL Sunday and Alex Rodriguez as examples of player-turned-television analysts. Fox executive producer Brad Zager explained that Meyer's presence was meant to provide 'intelligent dialogue'. For the 2020 season, the program was expanded to two hours. On November 4, 2020, Fox announced that the November 7 edition would not feature the usual panel and would be shortened to one hour, citing CDC and Los Angeles County Department of Health Services guidance. The guest panel was led by Charissa Thompson, joined by Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, and Emmanuel Acho. On November 12, Meyer revealed he had recently recovered from a COVID-19 infection.

On-site broadcasts

Big Noon Kickoff started out differently than its main rival, College GameDay. Instead of hitting the road, it was produced from Fox Sports' Los Angeles studio, only traveling to major games that Fox was broadcasting, like big rivalry matchups and the Big Ten Championship. In 2020, Fox planned four road trips but only completed three; the USC visit was scrapped because the network kept the crew home due to COVID-19 protocols, and Urban Meyer later said he had a COVID infection at the time. The show went on the road for the first six weeks of the 2021 season, a new step for the program. Starting in 2022, Big Noon Kickoff became a permanent traveling show for the entire season. When Deion Sanders took over as Colorado's head coach in 2023, Fox set up in Boulder for the Buffaloes' first three games. The Week 3 show, originally set for Penn State at Illinois, instead aired from the Rocky Mountain Showdown—the same site where ESPN held College GameDay that week. This marked the first time Big Noon Kickoff broadcast from the same location two weeks in a row and the first time it covered a game not carried by Fox.

Big Noon Saturday

Big Noon Saturday is a Fox weekly college football broadcast that has aired since 2019, featuring NCAA Division I FBS games kicking off at 12 p.m. Eastern. The game shown is frequently, though not always, the one hosted at the site of the network’s Big Noon Kickoff pregame show. The early start time has drawn criticism, particularly from programs outside the Eastern Time Zone. Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione argued that a noon ET kickoff for the 2021 Nebraska game, which marked the 50th anniversary of the 1971 "Game of the Century," would lower its stature. Stanford head coach David Shaw also objected to Fox scheduling noon starts for visiting Pac-12 teams. In August 2021, Oklahoma president Joe Harroz pointed to complaints about Big Noon Saturday when discussing the Sooners’ planned 2024 move to the SEC. He claimed the Big 12 would be "last in line" in future media negotiations, and that the early slot hurt recruiting, athlete experience, and fan enjoyment. The SEC began a new rights deal with ESPN/ABC the same season Oklahoma and Texas joined. During the 2021 season, Big Noon Saturday surpassed the SEC on CBS in average viewership for college football telecasts. That year’s Michigan–Ohio State game, in which Michigan snapped an eight-game losing streak, became the highest-rated regular-season contest of 2021 and the most-watched regular-season game since Alabama–LSU in 2019. As of 2024, the main broadcast crew consists of play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson, analyst Joel Klatt, and sideline reporter Jenny Taft, with Tom Rinaldi added for major matchups like The Game.