FOX is bringing its Big Noon Kickoff pregame show back to Penn State on Saturday, and Nittany Lions fans couldn’t be happier. They said so right in the mentions of FOX’s social-media announcement.

“Thanks for forcing another Primetime matchup into a 12pm spot”

“This should be a night game btw”

And…

Nothing personal, Urban Meyer, Brady Quinn and the FOX Big Noon Kickoff broadcast team that will be on stage outside the Bryce Jordan Center before Saturday’s Penn State-Ohio State game. It’s just that Penn State fans, like so many others, have issues with FOX’s Big Noon Saturday broadcast, which has wedged some of the conference’s marquee games into the noon Saturday slot. So for the second consecutive Penn State-Ohio State game at Beaver Stadium, fans will fight withering morning traffic, eat cold breakfast sandwiches and forgo an afternoon of Happy Valley tailgating for another early start.

So no, they’re not happy, particularly when they believe Ohio State should be visiting for the annual “Penn State White Out.” Few spoke for the fan base better than Chris Buchignani of State College, who co-hosts the Obligatory PSU Pregame Show and podcast, a radio show on 98.7 The Fox and a strong opinion of Big Noon games.

“The reason why I am happy at the age of 45 to still sit on an uncomfortable metal bench, sometimes even in bad weather, is because the energy of getting 100,000-plus humans together all rooting on a team they viscerally love is just a high you can get in very few other settings,” Buchignani said in an interview. “And so to deprive both the in-person audience, and really the national college football audience, of getting to experience that when the most is at stake — when you get two great programs, highly ranked teams like Penn State and Ohio State together — that’s the crime in my mind.”

Before FOX introduced Big Noon Saturday in 2019, Penn State fans largely could count on hosting either Michigan or Ohio State at night and for the annual “White Out.” But the last of those games occurred in 2020, when Penn State hosted Ohio State for a prime-time “White Out” before some players’ families, cardboard cutouts representing other fans and audio recording of cowbells during the COVID season. Since then, Penn State and Ohio State have played in FOX’s Big Noon window, and Penn State has shifted its “White Out” elsewhere.

In 2022, the opponent was Minnesota instead of Ohio State. This year it’s Washington, which vists Beaver Stadium for the “White Out” on Nov. 9. This summer, Penn State Athletic Director Patrick Kraft said he lobbied the Big Ten and its media-rights partners for a Penn State-Ohio State “White Out” in prime-time, but that discussion met resistance.

“We don’t land on any game [for the White Out],” Kraft said at Big Ten Media Days in Indianapolis. “I think you all know what we would choose if we were going to choose a White Out game. This year became a little more difficult because of the three networks and the ‘draft’ process.”

FOX opened the Big Noon broadcast window five years ago with hopes of taking over a Saturday college football timeslot. CBS owned the 3:30 window with the SEC, and ABC dominated prime-time. So when Wisconsin’s 35-14 win over Michigan drew 5.5 million viewers in 2019, FOX figured it had something.

“That led me and other to think, we should just lean into this,” Michael Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics at FOX Sports, told analyst Joel Klatt this summer.

Since then, according to FOX, Big Noon Saturday has been college football’s most-watched game for three consecutive years. In 2023, FOX averaged more than 6.7 million viewers for the noon window, an 8-percent increase over the previous season. ABC has been more competitive so far this year in the noon window, beating FOX in five of nine weeks, according to numbers compiled by Sports Media Watch.

Still, more viewers means higher ad rates and more value for the seven-year, $7 billion media-rights deal that FOX, NBC and CBS signed with the Big Ten in 2022. Which in turn means higher media-rights checks that the Big Ten cuts to Penn State and others.

Buchignani said he understands that and “I also just hate it.”

“It should be totally reasonable for someone to be a die-hard college football fan and not have to know anything about the mechanics of sports media-rights agreements,” said Buchignani, vice president of the Mount Nittany Conservancy. “Nevertheless, every time I see somebody, including the four of us on Obligatory, take a shot at Big Noon from the Penn State side, I laugh. They’re all correct, 100 percent. I also cringe a little bit because I know we’re biting the hand that feeds us. I’m very happy that, as a member of the Big Ten, Pat Kraft gets to cash an $80 million check every year.”

This year, money flowed into the Penn State-Ohio State noon-kick conversation from another perspective. On that summer edition of the Joel Klatt Show, Mulvihill explained why this Nov. 2 date on the college football calendar was even more attractive: It’s three days before the presidential election.

“There will be a lot of political money,” Mulvihill told Klatt. “The idea of being in control of that date, having the option of taking Ohio State-Penn State or Michigan-Oregon just a few days before the election and all that campaign money that will come with it, that really resonated with me.”

So, Penn State fans, enjoy your early gameday with a side of media-rights and election-dollars conversation. Buchignani said he will, too. Mostly.

“You know psychopaths like me, we’re addicts, right? They’re going to get us to follow anywhere they lead,” Buchignani said. “So if they put Penn State-Ohio State on the moon at 3 a.m., I’m going be calling Elon Musk to see if I can be there in person. Otherwise, I’ll be up at 3. But where their value is, is that ESPN, NBC and CBS are not contesting that time slot at all. So there’s a ton of casual viewers all over the country who probably don’t even care that much about college football. They might not watch another college football game this weekend, but they know the brand names of Ohio State and Penn State. So from a business standpoint, I get it. It makes sense. It’s just terrible.”

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