Why Big Noon Kickoff adding Dave Portnoy should officially bury the ‘SEC bias’ narrative once and for all
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Let me stop you right there.
If you’re reading this, you might be assuming that I’m about to launch into some anti-Barstool rant about why Dave Portnoy doesn’t belong in mainstream media, and that the entire FOX Sports brand is now tainted as a result of its decision to align with the company’s founder as an addition to “Big Noon Kickoff.” You could be bracing for a “day that college football media died” take, which would be an ironic thing to write on a … college football website.
Nah. You feel how you feel about him and Barstool as a whole, and my words won’t change that. That’s not the focus today.
The focus is instead on the “why.” As in, why did FOX Sports hire an unabashed Michigan fan to be a mainstay on its desk, and what does that actually say about the direction that the sport’s coverage is heading in? After all, Portnoy doesn’t fit in any traditional media box (analyst/former coach/former player/reporter), and as much support as he and the Barstool brand have among college football fans with their own on-site show, he’s also going to not-so-subtly oppose the network’s biggest brand partner, Ohio State.
You don’t have to be a media connoisseur to understand “Big Noon’s” desire to dethrone College GameDay as the go-to pregame show. Perhaps the timing of Portnoy’s arrival to FOX coinciding with Lee Corso’s sendoff isn’t a coincidence.
But as Puck’s John Ourand reported, this move was made because of another ESPN personality (H/T Awful Announcing):
Fox executives see a chance to insert a big personality to their lineup, and to leverage Portnoy’s Michigan fandom, which dovetails naturally with their Big Ten rights package,” writes Ourand. “After all, ESPN has a number of high-profile commentators, like Paul Finebaum, who openly advocate for the SEC, especially when it comes to getting teams in the College Football Playoff. (ESPN, of course, holds all of the SEC’s media rights through 2034.) In short, Fox executives and Big Ten officials wanted an on-air fanboy of their own.
Ah, there it is. They wanted “an on-air fanboy of their own” to rival Paul Finebaum. I can dig into why that’ll be challenging with someone like Portnoy, who can rile up the masses, but will probably have to learn how to eloquently deliver college football takes and at least learn how to properly pronounce “Oregon” (he incorrectly pronounces it “Ore-gahn”) before he can become a legitimate adversary to Finebaum, and really ESPN as a whole.
This news means something else, though.
I don’t ever want to hear cries of “SEC bias” ever again
At least not from the Big Ten crowd. You, Big Ten fans, now have a mainstream partner that’ll be even more biased than however biased you think ESPN is.
For what it’s worth, Finebaum isn’t on the College GameDay desk; he’s on the “SEC Nation” desk on SEC Network. Finebaum’s “open advocacy for the SEC” also includes criticism of the conference on ESPN platforms. Shoot, that criticism is the exact reason that every SEC coach and athletic director opposed “The Paul Finebaum Show” when the premise was introduced by late SEC Commissioner Mike Slive upon the network’s inception.
The dirty little secret is that Portnoy’s addition to Big Noon Kickoff is a sign of what other conferences have realized during Finebaum’s decade-plus rise on ESPN and SEC Network platforms — they all want their version of a Finebaum.
Last year, Dabo Swinney (of all people) questioned why the ACC doesn’t have their “f—in” version of Finebaum to help generate national discussion for the conference (H/T 247Sports). Swinney is right, and so are FOX executives for realizing that personalities are what make college football what it is. While SEC Network came 7 years after Big Ten Network and has spent the Playoff era playing catch-up with its annual TV contract, what it mastered immediately was the need for fresh, editorial content. “The Paul Finebaum Show” isn’t necessarily Finebaum’s main platform for launching into pro-SEC takes — he generates headlines for his opinions on sites like ours when he goes on other ESPN and non-ESPN shows — but between his callers and the guests he brings on, he created an editorial platform that’s 1-of-1 on a conference network.
This is the new world of college football media. I could launch into a rant about why it’s now mirroring political media coverage, but you didn’t come here for that. And if you did, well, sorry.
The numbers will tell you who is biased now … so does ESPN have even more free rein?
I brought this up last year in the beginning of ESPN’s new $2 billion deal with the SEC, and how College GameDay sites would likely shift to reflect that seeing as how it was also the first year that the Big Ten and ESPN weren’t TV partners. GameDay still prided itself on being a national show amid the SEC partnership. In fact, the desk featured just 1 SEC graduate, and it was Rece Davis (Alabama), AKA the most down-the-middle college football host in the business.
In 2024, here were the show’s on-campus visits by conference (regular season only):
- SEC: 8
- Big Ten: 5
- ACC: 1
- Big 12: 0
- Independent: 0
And for what it’s worth, the first on-campus GameDay site of 2025 will be at a Big Ten school, Ohio State.
For the “SEC bias” crowd who dumps on ESPN but conveniently ignores Big Noon Kickoff’s steeper coverage slant, remember something else. Big Noon Kickoff certainly chooses its destinations based on its conference partners. Since the FOX pregame show was launched in 2019, Big Noon has never been to an SEC or ACC campus. Why? FOX had rights with the Big Ten, Big 12 and the Pac-12. Nobody calls out Big Noon for having a bias toward those conferences even though it also prides itself on being a “national” show.
ESPN’s “SEC bias” will be far less obvious than Big Noon Kickoff’s “pro-Big Ten” or “anti-SEC” bias, especially now that Portnoy has been added. Will that change? And should it change?
The continued argument from Big Ten fans is that the network that has exclusive rights to the College Football Playoff shouldn’t have partnerships with certain conferences (like the SEC) and not others. Mind you, it was the Big Ten who chose that path. Also, we’re coming off a year in which the SEC had just 3 teams in the first 12-team field. “Borderline” SEC teams like Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina were left out of the field, despite that Playoff relationship, while 4 Big Ten schools earned bids.
Granted, it didn’t help the network’s pro-SEC perception that Kirk Herbstreit blasted the Indiana selection on GameDay the day after the Hoosiers lost a “not-as-close-as-the-final-score-indicated” game at Notre Dame (those are my words, not Herbstreit’s). It didn’t matter to Big Ten fans that Herbstreit said those negative things about a Big Ten school while GameDay was broadcast in front of Ohio Stadium.
What’ll be interesting to see is if GameDay personalities like Herbstreit and fellow Big Ten graduate Desmond Howard say things that rival Portnoy and the new-look Big Noon Kickoff. The only safe bet there is that Howard and Portnoy won’t offer up a shred of negativity on all things Michigan. They’re even on that account.
But what’s clear is that there’s a behind-the-scenes desire for more slanted college football coverage. It can’t really be “biased” coverage if everyone is leaning into being biased, albeit in varying ways. At a time in which all conferences are on their own at the start of the revenue sharing era, media perception will be more synonymous with network affiliation than ever before. That will indeed generate discussion.
Nobody should expect to turn on Big Noon Kickoff and see Portnoy offering unbiased takes. That’s not what he was hired to do. His ability to make Big Ten football seem more relevant nationally will be priority No. 1. If he succeeds in that, we’ll have more division than ever among college football fans. Time will tell if that’s good for the sport, but for now, we can declare that a popular subject of 21st century college football media is dead.
Rest in peace, “SEC bias” crowd. You lived a long, angsty life.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
