Is College GameDay biased?

Last season, Chris Fowler sounded off about the apparent disparity between ESPN’s coverage of the SEC compared with every other conference in college football. After he made those comments, various people went back through GameDay archives to time just how long the analysts spent talking about each conference. And indeed many found that the SEC got disproportionately more time over other conferences.

But 2015 is a new season of College GameDay. And now that the producers know people are scrutinizing their topic choices, one can assume that they will be more mindful.

To see if anything has changed, we timed the first College GameDay show of the new season. Now, first week is always a little difficult because of so many non-conference matchups, so we tried as much as possible to split up their discussions by talking points. However whenever they did broad game previews, we counted those for both conferences involved.

Let’s start with the brand new College GameDay intro. While we may have missed a few appearances due to quick cuts, here is how many major clips of each conference appeared in the intro:

SEC — 9
Big Ten — 7
ACC — 4
PAC-12 — 3
Big 12 — 3
Notre Dame — 2

LSU was by far a favorite. Auburn also appeared a couple of times, along with West Virginia and Notre Dame.

Now for the actual show. Going into it, I predicted that the Big Ten would get a decent amount of air time. Wisconsin was involved in the title game of the show, Ohio State is defending champs, and there was no chance they would not spend at least a minute talking about Jim Harbaugh at Michigan. Baylor and TCU are currently some of the top ranked teams in the country, which means the Big 12 would get some time as well.

But of course, I expected a good amount of SEC coverage, especially from the angle of, “The SEC fell last season, but can they rise back up?”

Here is the breakdown:

Conference Time Allotted
SEC 40:24
Big Ten 23:05
PAC-12 13:24
Big 12 10:41
Notre Dame 6:13
BYU 4:19
ACC 4:02
Mid-American 1:01
Missouri Valley 43 secs
Mountain West 42 secs

It looks like the SEC wins again, even with an entire segment of the show dedicated to talking about which quarterback Urban Meyer should go with as the starter.

It’s worth noting that a healthy part of the show which didn’t make it into the conference-specific breakdown above was dedicated to celebrating Chris Fowler and all he achieved while part of the College GameDay team.