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The biggest rivalry in college football arguably isn’t between two schools. It’s between Fox and ESPN—college football’s broadcast duopoly—and the two super-conferences they back, the Big Ten and SEC.
The next chapter of that rivalry commences this Saturday, when the SEC’s newest crown jewel, the No. 1 Texas Longhorns, take on the reigning national champions hailing from the Big Ten, the No. 3 Ohio State Buckeyes. Both leagues want bragging rights as their teams go head-to-head. But the battle commences long before kickoff. Fox has broadcast rights to the game, but Big Noon Kickoff and College GameDay will be outside Ohio Stadium, jockeying for viewers and fan attention.
The rivalry heated up five years ago, when the SEC announced it had signed an exclusive $3 billion deal with Disney, giving ESPN and ABC all of its college football rights. The following summer, the SEC announced it would add Texas and Oklahoma—entrenching its status as a super league and setting off a domino of conference realignment.
The Big Ten responded by adding USC and UCLA the following summer, as well as signing a multi-network deal worth at least $7 billion led by Fox after ESPN walked away from the network for the first time in four decades. When the Pac-12 was picked apart due to conference realignment, Fox bankrolled the Big Ten’s additions of Oregon and Washington, Front Office Sports reported at the time.
As things stand now, Fox owns most of the rights to the Big Ten, and ESPN has none. Meanwhile, ESPN owns all of the rights to the SEC.
Each network’s Saturday morning pregame show has also become a major component of the battle for supremacy. ESPN’s traveling roadshow is commencing its 39th season—arguably dominating the early-morning window for years. But in 2019, Fox launched its own traveling pregame show, the aforementioned Big Noon Kickoff, that has been chasing GameDay ever since.
ESPN continued to own the pregame time slot, but the network wasn’t complacent. In 2022, the network made the controversial decision to add Pat McAfee to the show, in the hopes that he could appeal to a younger audience. Then, this past offseason, FOS broke the news of a Fox Sports partnership with Barstool Sports that would include founder Dave Portnoy appearing on Big Noon. (Longtime GameDay analyst Desmond Howard has said he believes the move was a direct reaction to ESPN’s hiring of McAfee.)
Both pregame shows have compelling storylines of their own heading into this weekend.
Legendary coach and analyst Lee Corso will make his final appearance on GameDay before he retires, giving the analyst famous for his wacky headgear-wearing antics his swan song.
Meanwhile, Big Noon will debut Portnoy—a storyline that got even juicier this week when FOS reported that the Buckeyes had banned the Barstool founder, an outspoken Michigan fan, from entering the stadium (Portnoy confirmed the report, while Ohio State denied it).
GameDay has, overall, been the ratings favorite. Last season, for example, GameDay said it averaged 2.2 million viewers, while Fox averaged just under 1 million. The question is whether Big Noon can make up ground—and how that might affect the greater war between the two networks to own college football.
Neither ESPN nor Fox provided comment for this story.
