Every week when TV schedules get released, thousands of fans across the country have to face reality. Their favorite school’s next game has been scheduled at noon ET, 11 a.m. CT, or some other way-too-early local equivalent.
College football Saturdays have terrible early games. Here’s why we love them
In the comments, please give us your best story from a college football nooner, 11 a.m. CT kickoff, or what have you.
Marvin Gentry-USA TODAY Sports
Since TV partners largely dictate who does what in college football, there’s not much you can do about it. If you’re going to tailgate, you’ll have to wake up early, and you have a truncated amount of time to lather up with your libation of choice.
It also means your game’s probably not that good.
In the SEC, if you’ve got an early game, you’re probably playing an FCS team or Vanderbilt or something.
If you’re in the Big Ten, you have Stockholm syndrome. The nooner is just a way of life for you, and I’m sorry about that. The conference is famous for having a policy against scheduling night games in November up until a few years ago, because tradition or some crap.
If you’re in the ACC, you might be playing in front of a crowd like this.
There is nobody in the SEC more synonymous with the noon/11 a.m. kick than ESPN’s Dave Neal.
You’ve seen this play. The incredible Bluegrass Miracle, when LSU beat Kentucky on a Hail Mary. It is the noon-iest of noon games: an average game played by average teams that turned out to be remarkable. A three-hour slog that had the unlikeliest of endings.
Neal did play-by-play for that game, just like he’s done every Saturday for 18 years throughout the SEC. If you’ve ever watched an early game down south, chances are you’ve heard Neal’s voice.
Early kickoffs run in the man’s blood.
Neal’s father, Bob, was on the call when Turner Sports acquired SEC broadcast rights in the 1980s. Desiring an exclusive window, they looked early, so they wouldn’t be up against other national telecasts later in the day.
By 1992, Turner was out of the college football business. Jefferson-Pilot (and later Raycom) Sports became a staple of not-so-great SEC games.
Neal began broadcasting the conference full time in 1998. Since joining with ESPN’s SEC Network, he’s worked different time slots, but he loves early the games, even if he “might be the only one.”
“I would say that over the years I have become known as, ‘I do the noon game, I’m the noon-game guy.’ I would say that that’s happened on more than one occasion,” Neal told SB Nation. “I’m OK with that.
“There was a period there when people would say ‘what game do you do?’ And all you’d have to do was say, [and,] ‘Oh yeah, you’re the noon guy.’ And that kinda defined who I was, and I’m OK with that. And some people go, ‘oh I hate you, you’re the noon guy,’ but that’s OK.”
He knows his career hasn’t been defined by top-tier games.
And he’s cool with that, too. He says the fact that he does an SEC game means the matchup is packed with intrigue, even if it’s not the most exciting product. When games aren’t great, he makes sure to remember the fans of the two teams are involved, even if the casual observer is not.
“It’s about their team,” he says. “‘How are we gonna get better at left tackle, what’re we gonna do in the secondary? Our next opponent may be Alabama, so how are we gonna be able to play against the Crimson Tide?’ Maybe it’s an opportunity to see their second-string quarterback, and let’s see what he looks like.”
They aren’t all duds, though.
Neal regards the Bluegrass Miracle as the greatest finish he’s ever called, but that doesn’t make it the greatest game. In true early-game fashion, that game didn’t rouse interest for its first 59 minutes and 28 seconds.
“The scenes that led up to that final play are what make that so special,” Neal said. “The [premature] dumping of the Gatorade on the [Kentucky] coach, the fans storming the field. Literally hanging off the goalpost on one end of the field, trying to tear it down, while LSU was celebrating in the end zone on the opposite end of the field, and the Kentucky fans having no idea that their team just lost. Those things make that what it was and what it is.”
Early every Saturday on college football Twitter, you know what your timeline will be filled with.
Each and every week, sportswriters and fans are going to put empty seats on blast.
I may or may not be guilty of promoting such crowd-shaming in a past life.
Pay no attention to the date stamp. I was a very different person.
But the games right after College GameDay are the on-ramp to Saturday.
There are gifts under the early Christmas tree every week. The Red River Shootout has carved out an 11 a.m. CT foothold for itself. Since 2008, the game’s been played later in the day only once. Since 1990, Michigan and Ohio State have played at noon almost every year.
There can be as many as 14 or 16 hours to the viewing day, so easing into things is nice before the craziness later. But don’t forget the special early-game memories over the years.
It’s given us Wide Left.
And a chance to laugh at Notre Dame when it lost to Purdue.
And most importantly, it’s given us Michigan-Appalachian State.
Complain all you want, but the early game has a niche in football lore, and I will value it.
What are your stories of early-game greatness?
Here are ours. Add yours in the comments.
Luke Zimmerman: The year was 2004. As a sophomore, I’d never seen Ohio State win fewer than 10 games. It was a gilded (spoiled) existence.
A roommate and I made the trek a mile or so north to a Friday night soiree we’d set modest expectations for. The affair came to a conclusion at all of 1:30 a.m. We were the last two people standing at the kegger, and the occupants of the house left us the tap and said, “Go nuts. Thanks for coming.” We did.
My roommate and I enjoyed their libations not just for a few more hours, but all the way until tailgating the next morning.
We decided to order a pay-per-view movie. Training Day seemed like the move. The house’s DVR password was its address number. We were in. Feeling guilty, we put $5 in an envelope outside an acquaintance’s bedroom. Not even an hour later, we retrieved the envelope to put it toward a 4 a.m. pizza.
The next morning, we untapped the keg (we’re not total monsters), and headed back to our residence to pregame.
I woke up seven hours later, miraculously feeling fine — the vital organs of a 19-year-old are a miraculous thing — and Ohio State had beaten Penn State ugly, 21-10. It was the first (and only) Ohio State game I’ve missed since 2003.
My roommate made it to the game ... only to be asked by security to leave for falling asleep standing and nearly colliding into those around him. We’ll let history judge who were the real winners and losers.
Go Bucks. And sorry, Mom.
Richard: Florida played USF in 2010, my senior year of high school (yes, you’re old). I had injured my knee a few weeks earlier at football practice and was on crutches. My seats were row 80-something in The Swamp. That stadium’s really steep.
It also happened to be the day a Gainesville pastor claimed he was going to burn the Quran on camera. Also, did I mention the game was on Sept. 11? My mother was out of town and not happy I was going.
This was also the hottest game I have ever been to in that stadium. Florida won, but I sweated through a pair of khaki shorts and an ace bandage.
Bill Connelly: Sept. 29, 2001. My friends and I have gotten pretty good at the tailgating thing. We decide to tailgate all night. We meet in our spot around 10 p.m., and we get started. Some time between 10 p.m. and 11 a.m. ...
- We run out of beer.
- A friend sneaks to his car to “make a call” (he takes a nap).
- A friend who works across the street sneaks into his work cafeteria as soon as it opens, for coffee.
- While we’re bored as hell in the middle of the night, one of us asks my roommate what sounds fun. He throws up without retching. He casually turns his head, barfs, wipes his mouth, and says, “I don’t know. What do you guys have in mind?”
- Half the town of Lincoln shows up to hang out. They apparently drive to town for road games even when they don’t have tickets? My friend’s future wife — simply a friend of his at the time — shows up in the morning to set up her part of the tailgate, and some women we don’t know are still just sort of hanging out. She is still mad at him for this 15 years later.
The game begins, and on Missouri’s first defensive series, I join the student section in yelling. My stomach cramps up, and I do not speak for 25 minutes.
Then this happens:
We leave early in the fourth quarter and go to bed around 5 p.m.
Dan Rubenstein: When I hosted fun tailgating videos for SI.com, I shot at the 2008 Rutgers game in Morgantown. It was noon local time. After some fans gave me breakfast, they told me to wash it down with moonshine. Having never been to West Virginia or a game in Morgantown, I obliged. As a proud lightweight, I immediately felt the ’shine, and a short bit later, up in the press box as I was importing footage, I damn near fell asleep.
The lesson: Drink moonshine if you want, but don’t count on average Big East football to keep you awake.
Alex Kirshner: Maryland was playing some cupcake game early in my sophomore year, and they passed out vouchers for free hot dogs that were only redeemable after halftime. All of my friends stayed just long enough to cash in on their franks. I stayed and watched Maryland’s game against Old Dominion to its completion. It was a shady decision.
Morgan Moriarty: So I hear about this thing, “Fraternity Roadtrip,” that a bunch of my friends are going to. I, a clueless freshman, think of this as my one opportunity to see Florida play No. 1 LSU in Death Valley. The game was a 2:30 local kick, which isn’t technically a nooner, but is early by East Coast standards.
Then came the one thing I was soon to find out about these road trips: no one goes to the game. The concept, for the most part, is getting intoxicated on a bus for hours, then on game day, renting out a bar watch the game. I somehow find tickets and beg one of my best friends in my sorority to go. She agrees, after some convincing.
Fast forward to the tailgate. Let’s just say an early game mixed with a tailgate that has a bar tab, when you’re already pressed for time, is a bad combination. We get to the stadium area, filled with LSU tailgaters. My friend, the most outgoing person you’ll ever meet, decided to meander into an LSU tailgate and eat some of their food, uninvited. We get yelled and cursed at, and we walk (run) into the stadium. My friend and I did not last long. I got us hot dogs (a bad pairing with early heat, an upper-deck seat in a 100,000-seat stadium, and alcohol). We leave at, like, halftime of a 41-11 beatdown loss.
Spencer Hall: Ole Miss-Florida, 2008. The minute Jevan Snead started bombing deep passes on our secondary, I knew we’d been noon-gamed. Let’s never talk about it ever again.
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