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O’Gara: SEC bias? Why College GameDay no longer has to care if that’s what you think
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The SEC bias crowd isn’t going to like when College GameDay announces that it’ll be heading to Georgia-Alabama in Week 5.
With both teams on bye this weekend, that’s coming early, along with the reality that including this Saturday’s trip to Oklahoma for the Josh Heupel reunion in Norman — a place that the ESPN show hasn’t been to with fans since 2012 — GameDay will have been to an SEC campus 4 times before the end of September.
That won’t be a shocking revelation to the decision-makers at GameDay. The revelation isn’t that GameDay has had an SEC-heavy start in its first year of this new TV contract, which no longer features any Big Ten games; it’s that GameDay doesn’t care if you or anyone else is aware of that.
How do we know that? Excluding 2020 with delayed schedules (the ACC and Big 12 started before the other Power 5 conferences), this is the first time since 2008 that GameDay will have selected 3 campuses from a specific conference before October. That year, 2008, GameDay made trips to Gainesville for Miami-Florida in Week 2, LSU-Auburn in Week 4 and Alabama-Georgia in Athens in Week 5. All featured top-10 teams hosting, with 2 of which being a battle of top-10 teams, but that’s somewhat irrelevant.
Something else happened that year. Just ahead of the 2008 season, ESPN and the SEC agreed to a 15-year deal that was worth more than $2 billion.
The only other season with that much early-season conference “favoritism” shown by GameDay was when the show went to 3 different Big Ten campuses before October in 1999. Mind you, that was the first year that GameDay didn’t have any studio shows/off weeks and it was still finding its footing.
You can bet it’s not a coincidence that the self-aware national show only let that happen once since then. Well, I suppose it’s twice now. Neither instance was coincidence, either.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean ESPN only cares about the SEC now. It just means that with this new partnership, wherein ESPN and the SEC are in an exclusive relationship, the network doesn’t need to worry about how balanced it is with its GameDay decisions.
Big Noon Kickoff certainly chooses its destinations based on its conference partners. Since the FOX pregame show was launched in 2019, Big Noon has never been to an SEC or ACC campus. Why? FOX had rights with the Big Ten, Big 12 and the Pac-12. Nobody calls out Big Noon for having a bias toward those conferences even though it also prides itself on being a “national” show.
To GameDay’s credit, it already went to a Big Ten campus this year for Texas-Michigan. There’ll still likely be other instances of GameDay going to Big Ten schools even though ESPN and the Big Ten no longer are partners.
But with Big Noon Kickoff operating the way it does, it’s a fair question — why does GameDay have to be impartial with its destinations?
The short answer is that it doesn’t. The more accurate answer is that it can default to a couple things. For starters, it doesn’t want to just go wherever Big Noon Kickoff is, which makes sense. It’s an audience-fueled pregame show. You’d ideally like as few divided crowds as possible, unless the game can support it like Texas-Michigan.
In a weird way, GameDay might actually be able to default even more to what the best game is instead of bypassing some top-15 matchup because ESPN is worried about upsetting one of its other major conference TV partners, which is now just the SEC, ACC and Big 12. So far, it’s not like they attended middle-of-the-road SEC games:
- Week 0: No. 10 Florida State vs. Georgia Tech (in Dublin)
- Week 1: No. 7 Notre Dame at No. 25 Texas A&M
- Week 2: No. 3 Texas at No. 10 Michigan
- Week 3: No. 16 LSU at South Carolina
- Week 4: No. 6 Tennessee at No. 15 Oklahoma
- Week 5: TBD (but expect it to be No. 2 Georgia at No. 4 Alabama)
Yeah, some scoffed at LSU-South Carolina. OK, then. What was the better option? The only other Top-25 matchup Saturday — Arizona-Kansas State was on Friday — was No. 24 Boston College at No. 6 Mizzou. Yet some argued that Oregon-Oregon State should have gotten that treatment even though it was a game with an 18.5-point spread that was being played at a school that just got left in the dust by its own conference. Big Noon already was going to be at Alabama-Wisconsin, so that didn’t make sense, either.
The irony is that GameDay destination sticklers knock the show because it doesn’t make enough trips to the small schools or the ones that would appreciate it more. Also of note, GameDay in Columbia was electric … because it was the first visit there in 10 years.
Saturday’s destination will also be electric, in part because of the Josh Heupel-Oklahoma reunion, but also because GameDay is making its first trip to Norman with fans since 2012. And yet, rest assured, some will criticize that decision or the likely decision that it’ll be at Georgia-Alabama in Week 5.
Yeah, that’s SEC-heavy. You know what else is SEC-heavy? The top of the AP Poll. It features 6 SEC teams in the top 7 and 9 teams in the Top 25. Wouldn’t it be weird if a conference with that type of representation in the AP Poll was given equal representation by GameDay? What’d be weird is if in the first year that ESPN had exclusive SEC rights and zero Big Ten rights, the network opted instead for a Big Ten-heavy start.
In 2008, GameDay made 5 trips to SEC campuses. The 2014 season one-upped that with 6 trips. It remains to be seen if that’ll be topped in 2024. Remember, attending Texas-Oklahoma or Florida-Georgia wouldn’t count toward the SEC total because we’re limiting this to on-campus shows. Even in the expanded SEC with this new ESPN deal, 6 might be the max.
Then again, these are new times. ESPN appears to be embracing them.
Call it SEC bias, if you want. GameDay doesn’t have to care anymore.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
