College football season is nearly here.
Forget last Saturday. It’s called Week 0 for a reason. Do you really want to believe the first game of the 2022 season was 3-9 Northwestern and 3-9 Nebraska playing halfway around the world?
Here at Barrett Sports Media, we are celebrating college football from a media angle. All week long, our editors and resident college football superfans, Arky Shea, Demetri Ravanos and Garrett Searight, will be looking at the best the media has to offer in terms of college football coverage.
The entire schedule is as follows:
MONDAY: Best Local Show
TUESDAY: Best National Radio Show
WEDNESDAY: Best College Football Podcast
THURSDAY: Best TV Show
FRIDAY: Best TV Play-by-Play Booth
College football is all over television on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. All of those games require A LOT of studio coverage. So who does it best?
Do you prefer the pageantry and storytelling of College Gameday? Maybe the no-nonsense approach of Big Noon Kickoff is more your speed. What if the best TV show isn’t on in a pregame window?
As we inch closer to the inevitable tag team main event featuring the SEC and ESPN versus the Big Ten and FOX, this discussion may end up being the college football media’s most important pissing contest. Here are our picks for college football’s best TV show.
COLLEGE GAMEDAY by Arky Shea
You can debate the validity of any show you want, the king is still ESPN’s College GameDay. The show kicked off it’s 36th season and has lapped the field in terms of college fandom allegiance and tradition. The desk lineup is loaded with names that you associate with the sport: Rece Davis who has deep ties into college football as a graduate of the University of Alabama, Desmond Howard, a Heisman Trophy winner that’s been giving his hot takes since 2005 on GameDay, Kirk Herbstreit who has become the most influential broadcasting voice in the sport. THE MOST. And of course Lee Corso, a man that pioneered something so collegiate, so simple and so brilliant that nobody else can ever do it! Only one man’s headgear prediction matters.
It’s become everyone’s Saturday wake-up call for a reason. There is a chemistry on that set that is so pure that it’s morphed long ago into familial status. There’s not another college football TV show that effortlessly entertains the sport’s diehards until kickoff like GameDay. It will take a lot to knock the crown off their head. The show has spearheaded so many ideas we take for granted about a pregame show like showing up on location, promoting fan’s to bring their own signage and inviting celebrities to the table to beef up the curb appeal. Hands down, College GameDay still reigns.
BIG NOON KICKOFF by Garrett Searight
College GameDay is a lot like my 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee. I loved that car. I had so many memories with it that I will cherish until my dying day. I openly wept the day a man didn’t tie down rabbit cages in the back of his truck and I had to stop on the highway to avoid hitting them and someone rear-ended me and the Jeep was totaled. I was gonna drive that Jeep for another 150,000 miles. And then I switched to a new car, and while I still love that old Jeep, you realized there’s a whole new wave of automotive technology out there.
When Big Noon Kickoff hit the airwaves, I couldn’t help but sample it. Demetri wrote a story a few weeks ago that included the mission of Big Noon Kickoff was to be new and relevant and he couldn’t be more correct. I’m 32 years old. Desmond Howard — who last week said he couldn’t understand how Ohio State quarterback C.J. Stroud, who last year threw for 44 touchdowns and was a Heisman Trophy finalist, was the Heisman frontrunner this year — won the Heisman Trophy the year after I was born. Kirk Herbstreit was Ohio State’s quarterback when I was in diapers. Lee Corso’s last year as a college head coach was a year after my mom graduated high school.
On the flip side, Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart were college football during my formative years. Urban Meyer, while a troubling figure, is great on TV and won a National Championship coaching my favorite school in the last decade. Bob Stoops, who wasn’t nearly as great at TV as Meyer, was as worthy of a replacement as you could find. The Big Noon Kickoff cast is as relevant as one could assemble. Their puzzling insistence on using Clay Travis every Saturday notwithstanding, Big Noon Kickoff’s strictly-football approach is a welcomed change to GameDay’s broader, softer storytelling elements.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL FINAL by Demetri Ravanos
With all due respect to my colleagues, who I think are bright guys, the pregame ain’t it for college football on TV. We pregame all week and then the national media makes a hard pivot to the NFL the second the clock hits zero in Honolulu. A real college football fan knows the value and importance of College Football Final! It’s not just the late-night airing, it is the consecutive reruns on Sunday mornings that give us one last chance to contextualize everything that happened the night before.
The show has had problems in the past. I would argue that Lou Holtz made the show nearly unwatchable for years. I like what they have going now though. Matt Barrie brings the right level of snarkiness to the show alongside experts Joey Galloway and Jessie Palmer. The helmet stickers, the poll projections, the general sense of closure to the week are all needed on a Sunday before those of us that live and die with the college game turn our collective attention to the NFL.
