Members of the Ohio General Assembly are very concerned about college football.<\/p>\n
A bill has been introduced in the legislature to prohibit Ohio State and other state schools from playing most of its home games before 3:30 p.m. Under the terms of the proposal by Rep. Tex Fischer (R), games including at least one state school and games including top-10 teams would be prohibited from starting earlier than the mid-afternoon. With one exception.<\/p>\n
\u201cDivision (B) of this section does not apply if an earlier start time of a college football game between two teams is a college football tradition,\u201d the bill states. \u201cFor this purpose, a \u2018college football tradition\u2019 is a start time of a game between the teams of two institutions whose football teams have competed against each other at least fifty times and the start time has been the same for at least ninety-five per cent of those games.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, that caveat would exempt Ohio State\u2019s annual rivalry game with Michigan from the ban. The Buckeyes and Wolverines have traditionally played at noon ET on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n
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The bill comes amidst much consternation among Ohio State fans with the Big Ten\u2019s media rights contract with Fox. The network gets the pick of the conference\u2019s top game every weekend in football season and places its marquee game of the week at noon ET as part of its \u201cBig Noon Saturday\u201d programming. With other top games around the country later in the afternoon and in the evening, Fox has been rewarded with strong ratings in the time slot.<\/p>\n
That time slot has heavily featured Ohio State. Seven of the Buckeyes\u2019 12 regular-season games were at noon ET in 2024 and six of those games were at home. Marquee contests vs. Penn State, Indiana and Michigan were all on Fox at noon.<\/p>\n
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The early start times have drawn frustration from fans who attend the games for many reasons, including the inability to tailgate during the day. But Fox is a big reason why Ohio State and other Big Ten teams get so much money per year. It\u2019s hard to see OSU and other Big Ten schools trading less TV money for fewer early kickoffs.<\/p>\n
The bill to ban early kickoffs comes just months after a bill was introduced to ban flag-planting at a football stadium.<\/a> That bill was spawned by Michigan\u2019s flag-planting display following the Wolverines\u2019 13-10 win over the Buckeyes<\/a> in 2024. Ohio State went on to win the College Football Playoff after the loss to the Wolverines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Members of the Ohio General Assembly are very concerned about college football. A bill has been introduced in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[13766,1675,331,7,7989,18163,932,957,49,48,18162,1446,948],"class_list":{"0":"post-52739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-ben-jackson","9":"tag-buckeyes","10":"tag-college-football","11":"tag-football","12":"tag-football-games","13":"tag-football-teams","14":"tag-indiana","15":"tag-michigan","16":"tag-ncaa","17":"tag-ncaa-football","18":"tag-ohio-general-assembly","19":"tag-ohio-state","20":"tag-penn-state"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114513256747892863","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}