Fox’s ‘Big Noon Kickoff’ had its best season ever: How much of that was due to Dave Portnoy?

Last weekend’s showdown between Ohio State and Michigan put up monster numbers, as expected. The Game drew 18.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched regular-season college football game of this year and the second-most-watched regular-season game in Fox history.

Somewhat lost in those boffo numbers was a similar boost for Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff, which announced that it drew 4,358,000 viewers from 11:00 a.m. to the show’s end, making it the second-most-watched program in show history. That number also topped College GameDay over that timeframe (ESPN’s flagship college football show saw 3.9 million viewers across that hour). While it’s worth noting that BNK went long through around 12:14 p.m. on Saturday, while GameDay signed off a few minutes after 12:00 p.m., a win is still a win.

In their announcement, Fox Sports also noted that this was the most-watched season in BNK history.

Someone who was more than ready to take a victory lap on that was Dave Portnoy. The Barstool Sports owner was added this season as part of a Fox Sports-Barstool Sports partnership, and was expected to be their answer to GameDay’s Pat McAfee.

GameDay still lapped BNK across the board in terms of overall audience this season, but credit is due to the Fox college football pregame show for grabbing more eyeballs.

Portnoy is taking a lot of credit for the ratings growth, but can we attribute these numbers solely to him? We’re not so sure.

Any discussion about ratings this year has to begin with Nielsen’s updated Big Data + Panel methodology. The new calculation incorporates a combination of Nielsen’s usual randomly selected “panel” (with expanded out-of-home viewing) and proprietary numbers from streamers “at the device level.” In layman’s terms, Nielsen is presumably getting better numbers from more sources than it used to.

As such, it’s no surprise that you’ve been hearing about record-breaking ratings and audience numbers all year long across every sport (except pro wrestling). So it stands to reason that BNK, like just about every sports-related programming in 2025, was going to see an uptick in ratings no matter what.

We don’t know what BNK’s previous best season was for comparison, so we can’t tell how much of a boost this season was.

Setting that aside, BNK’s value to Fox has long been as a way to promote the Big Noon Saturday game directly, which can sometimes be a stark contrast to College GameDay’s anyone-and-everyone approach. That’s had adverse effects in years where the Big Noon slate hasn’t always been too exciting (last year’s Ohio State-Marshall game comes to mind).

This season has featured some of the biggest college football games of the year, including the Texas-Ohio State season-opener, Penn State-Ohio State, Oregon-Iowa, and OSU-Michigan. Those games garnered big ratings numbers, which trickled down to the pre-game show’s final hour.

Now, we don’t want to discount Portnoy entirely. He obviously brings with him a loyal Barstool fanbase and has generated plenty of headlines throughout the season. However, many of those headlines concerned shows he wasn’t there for, either because his deal didn’t require it or because the Big Ten allegedly didn’t want him there. Portnoy has played to his hot-take strengths, made campus appearances during the week, and stoked social media drama. But whereas McAfee’s field-goal segment and shirtless antics became weekly must-see traditions, Portnoy is still looking for a signature segment that draws in audiences.

At the end of the day, Fox wanted to see Big Noon Kickoff grab a bigger slice of the CFB pre-game audience, and it accomplished that goal, at least this season. So it kinda doesn’t matter how they did it.

As for catching GameDay, that’s still a whole other ballgame.