Football season is in full swing in the Steel City, and while the joy of another year of Pitt football brings excitement, waking up early to cheer on the Panthers certainly doesn’t. Of the three home games Pitt has hosted this season, all have kicked off at noon. The next two games against Boston College and Florida State are also set to kick off at noon.
Any football fan will tell you that going to the game is only half the fun, and that tailgating is the best way to enjoy the season. But a game starting at noon involves getting to the stadium several hours early to take part in the tailgate.
I may not speak for all, but I don’t appreciate starting my weekend by waking up at the crack of dawn to get to the North Shore at an unreasonable time. No college student should have to face the horrors of waking up on a Saturday before 10 a.m.
Getting to the game on time is especially difficult for Pitt students, who have to travel over four miles from campus to Acrisure Stadium. Students attending have to set aside time to get to the stadium accordingly. For a game that kicks off at noon, the early morning logistics can ruin game day before the Panthers even get a chance to do so.
“It definitely has an effect on the gameday experience,” Judd Isaacs, a senior at Pitt, said. “Most students are going out the night before, so asking them to wake up and travel by bus or train to a 7 a.m. tailgate is a huge ask.”
Isaacs also coordinates tailgates for his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu. The main tailgating lots open five hours before game time, so Isaacs wakes up at 6 a.m. on game days to load up his car and make it to the North Shore by 7 a.m.
Charlie Voss, a sophomore member of Sigma Chi, says he is up as early as 6:30 a.m. on game days to help set up his fraternity’s tailgate. Even with the early start, Voss says he doesn’t enter the game until 12:30 p.m. for most games.
Frank Bevenour, a sophomore who frequents the Clark Lot at Acrisure, wakes up at 8 a.m. for most noon kickoffs. Despite repping the blue and gold every Saturday, Bevenour is not a fan of the repeated early starts to begin the season.
“I don’t like it,” Bevenour said. “After a Friday, I want to sleep in and catch up on sleep I missed during the week, but I can’t because of the game.”
Kickoff times for ACC games are decided by ESPN, the conference’s primary rights holder, about a week before the game, leaving fans unsure of their plans for each game until the week of. ESPN tries to prioritize high-quality matchups that the network believes will get the most viewers, but with a large inventory of games, it’s hard to give favorable kickoff times to every school.
The ACC’s website claims they try to lobby for desirable kickoff times, “but sometimes a school’s desire simply falls victim to the week of the year on which it is scheduled and how that compares to the inventory available from elsewhere in our league or from other conferences.”
With each passing day, conferences like the ACC become less influential in the college football sphere, while conferences like the SEC and Big Ten continue to dominate ratings and revenue. Why would ESPN feel the need to put Pitt and Louisville in primetime when Alabama and Georgia would draw an audience of potentially millions?
While there’s much more discourse regarding the consequences of college football’s shift towards increasing revenue and improving TV ratings, one side effect is that matchups deemed “lower quality” in a network’s eyes will continue to start at noon.
For the teams that aren’t on top of the ratings game — unfortunately, the Panthers — fans will have to continue to suffer through early morning alarms and exhausting Saturdays. Money talks, and as big games continue to get moved to primetime slots, noon kickoffs will become more common for fans of lesser teams, harming the enjoyment of game day.
See you next Saturday at 12 p.m. sharp, Panther fans.
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