The Ohio State Buckeyes have a Week 3 Big Noon Kickoff matchup with the Kent State Golden Flashes, and as you'd expect, it's not being received well by the national College Football-viewing audience.
Awful Announcing's Matt Yoder treated the Buckeyes' hosting the Golden Flashes at the "Shoe" with even less reverence than he treated last season's nearly-CFP-bound DFW-based North Texas Mean Green's Week 1 Big Noon Kickoff showdown with the defending champion Indiana Hoosiers.
"Big Noon Saturday will begin with the defending national champion Indiana Hoosiers. But they won’t be facing Texas. Instead, they will be hosting North Texas," Yoder prefaced before cynically and rhetorically asking, "At least it’s in the same state, right?
"...Week 3 returns to more glorified preseason action when the Ohio State Buckeyes host their fierce in-state rivals, the Kent State Golden Flashes. The last time those two teams played, Ohio State defeated Kent State by a 66-0 scoreline."
To be fair to Yoder, the Mean Green should drop off a cliff in 2026 after losing Eric Morris, most of his coaching staff, and star quarterback Drew Mestemaker to the Oklahoma State Cowboys this offseason. That is an underwhelming Week 1 matchup, though the real goal is to show a fired-up crowd in Bloomington and one of the game's newest coaching stars, Curt Cignetti. Excitement alone carries the Week 1 schedule, since many marquee programs are playing supposed Group of Six "cupcakes."
To be fair to the Golden Flashes, though, 2014's results don't matter in 2026. That is a different world than the NIL/rev-share-driven one we now live in, where talent is more spread out. Kent State figures to be a respectable program under Mark Carney in his second season. Carney was part of some bad seasons on the offensive staff, including a dead-last 2024 finish on the scoring side, but there was notable improvement in effort on both sides of the ball last year.
Treating these matchups as a joke will only help the cause of politicians like Ohio's republican gubernatorial candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, who want to shut down institutions like KSU and the University of Akron. That's not a world any College Football fan should want.
FOX's Big Noon Kickoff continues to be an unpopular product
FOX making the biggest deal about the noon ET/11 am time slot is just a way for them to preserve the rest of the schedule for the MLB in October and other sports throughout the winter. Most Big Ten teams affected by this, and truly this goes for most conferences, feel a night game is a far superior experience.
So even when Big Noon Kickoff gets marquee games, those fanbases would rather be watching their teams under the lights anyway. Truthfully, FOX simply doesn't have a popular product either way, so damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
They can't all be winners, right? FOX is finding out that they can all be losers, though. The more you are part of changes to College Football, the more heat you'll get, as FOX, ESPN, and others have been finding out.
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