Ohio State football owns Noon, and by “own” we mean “forever cursed”

This doesn’t narrow it down, but I’ll be more specific.about five years ago I wrote a stupid article about how the noon game sucks for all sorts of ridiculous and contradictory reasons I won’t repeat it here. Long story short, it ends up being one of those things that you start writing about thinking you have a relatively salient point, and then like 70% of the way through you start realizing how stupid you sound, but then point out how much you understand the concept So committed that you say “go to hell” and post it anyway and hope no one reads it. 99 comments later called me an idiot, and I was forced to reassess my position (or, at least, whether I should be so openly expressing my bad opinion).

In any case, if there is any doubt about where I stand in 2022, let me be clear: my veil has been lifted from my eyes, and the trumpets of heaven have revealed the truth to me.

Absolutely no kick ass in a midday game.

Anything fun you might reasonably want to accomplish on any given fall Saturday, other than staring at a TV screen with a slack jaw, will be completely gone by the time 12 p.m. starts. Yes, if you wake up early enough, put on your pants, and squint angrily at life, you may have enough time to start doing laundry but not finish it, or buy three unrelated items at CVS, Then it sits on the kitchen counter for a few weeks, but if you want to tuck in some gourd-related frivolity too, leave it alone. You have a three-and-a-half hour appointment in the middle of the day that will greatly disrupt any other plans you may have, after which you will be dedicated to taking a nap or watching more football or both.

Yet college football fans as a whole simply couldn’t pry themselves off their TVs at noon, and Ohio State was largely to blame.

Let’s backtrack a bit first. Ohio State will play Notre Dame under the lights on Sept. 2 in its season opener. It’s pretty cool and good; two story shows that rarely compete against each other despite their geographic proximity, meet in one of the shrines of college athletics, and fight in front of a sure (probably?) crowded house. There will be narrative, drama and setting, and everything you need to have a great Saturday night.

It’s exciting, but another thing about the Fighting Irish coming to town is that even the average observer can know exactly which network the match will be aired on by just knowing the start time. Cool night game? That has to be ABC or ESPN. Noon or some other odd time? FOX or BTN, or finally, some streaming service you only know by name because your 11-year-old Minecraft-obsessed nephew wrote it for you on the back of a napkin.

You might be thinking, “No one can get rid of these messy midday games of mine?!?” But I have the same bad news for you: They’re never going to go away, because no matter who’s on the air, the network has discovered that Ohio’s secret sauce is exactly what people want on a Saturday at 12pm.

Try to take your eyes off the big games in this table for a second and start comparing Rutgers, Purdue and Indiana on Ohio State’s 2021 schedule. It’s clear that the ratings for the ostensibly “boring” games get a boost when taking the Big Noon spot at FOX when compared to similar nighttime games, head-to-head with all logic and common sense. Even on a stacked college football weekend, Ohio State’s midday game with Maryland was similar to Indiana’s featured night game a few weeks later (on a particularly boring weekend).

Now, if you look at the start time, There’s a lot to be decided on Ohio State’s 2022 football schedule, This is by design; the network wants to have a preferred time slot for the teams they think will bring in the most viewers each week. If Scott Frost was visited by the ghost of Tom Osborne, who was still alive, he gifted him $500 million for a perfect season on his way to an elite college transfer, Well FOX doesn’t want to be stuck with the Huskers at 3:30 in mid-October on FS1 and one of their working cameras.

Not just Ohio State. Of the 13 regular-season college football weekends in 2021, noon games are the most watched games of the week. Night games? Just three.

So, like it or not, midday games aren’t just here to stay, they’re becoming the primary way we watch college football. The templates provided by Ohio State and FOX demonstrate how successful a groggy, sleepy noon can be, hell: we’ve been following them.

At night at Notre Dame de Paris it will be very lively. Just don’t expect more of this to happen in 2022.