Oklahoma football: Sooners playing disproportionate number of 11 a.m. kickoffs
By Chip Rouse
If you’ve noticed that during the Oklahoma football season the Sooners seem to play a good number of games in the 11 a.m. TV time slot, it’s because they do — almost half to be precise.
On Monday, it was announced that the Oklahoma-Kansas game on Oct. 28 is scheduled for kickoff in the early morning TV window. That will be the third game in a row that the Sooners’ game has been scheduled for an 11 a.m. start and the fifth time in eight games.
And there is a good chance there will be at least one more 11 a.m. game on the schedule out of OU’s remaining four games after Kansas. That would match the same number of 11 a.m. games that were assigned to Oklahoma in both the 2022 and 2021 season. In 2021, Oklahoma played four consecutive 11 a.m. games.
That all adds up to 17 of 36 regular-season games over the last three years, an average of half the games every season falling in the early Saturday TV time window. That seems to me to be a disproportionate number compared to other big-name football brands.
https://twitter.com/OU_Football/status/1713978694883324210?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1713978694883324210%7Ctwgr%5E97201981732e7702d19c3c0f0a9d49154b0a846a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsoonerswire.usatoday.com%2F2023%2F10%2F16%2Foklahoma-sooners-football-kansas-jayhawks-week-9-2023-season-broadcast-information-how-to-watch%2F
In 2022, for example, Texas had three 11 a.m. games (one of which was with Oklahoma), Kansas State had two in that time window, and Oklahoma State just one a year ago. Looking at the SEC, Georgia had three games in the 11 a.m. time slot (12 noon ET), and Alabama played just two early games.
Someone in the scheduling department must have it in for the OU football team. Either that, or the folks at FOX Sports Division love the Sooners enough to schedule them as part of “Big Noon Kickoff,” that network’s prime college game of the week.
It would be easy to blame the FOX family of stations as the culprit for OU’s seemingly disproportionate number of 11 a.m. kickoffs because of the media agreement FOX has with the Big 12. But ESPN and ABC, both owned by the Walt Disney Company, also schedule 11 a.m. games and have agreements with both the SEC and Big 12. That being the case, you would think other schools in those conferences would have a similar number of appearances in the early Saturday time slot.
Perhaps all of this will change next season when Oklahoma is part of the SEC, which tends to have a lot of mid-afternoon and evening games as part of the TV scheduling. There has already been talk of moving the annual Red River Rivalry game between OU and Texas to a 2:30 CT time slot. Since 2000, that game has been played primarily at 11 a.m.
I don’t know that there are any studies showing differences in performance levels of college football players at different times of the day, but clearly there is unbalance as far as the Sooners are concerned in the number of games they are being asked to play in the earliest TV window on Saturdays.