Top 5 Best TV Slots & Channels for Big 12 College Football: Top 5 Tuesday

It’s Top Five Tuesday on First and 12! This week, Adam Gibby ranks the Top 5 best time slots and TV channels for watching Big 12 football. From FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff to Saturday night ESPN showdowns, we’re breaking down when and where the Big 12 shines brightest on national television. Discover which TV windows deliver the best matchups, biggest atmospheres, and most exposure for Big 12 teams. Whether you're a BYU fan out west or a K-State diehard in the heartland, this episode helps you plan your perfect Saturday around the conference that never sleeps.

🔥 Keywords:
Big 12 football TV schedule, best Big 12 time slots, FOX Big Noon Kickoff, ESPN Big 12 games, ABC Saturday Night Football, Big 12 on FS1, college football viewing guide, First and 12 Podcast, Top Five Tuesday, Adam Gibby, Big 12 fans, Big 12 primetime games, Big 12 media rights

Transcript

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College football is just around the corner, at least starting to feel that way, isn't it? Well, when is the best time to actually watch a game? We're going to talk about that on today's episode. Hello, and welcome to today's episode of First and 12, I'm your host, Adam Gibby. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you enjoyed this show, if you could do me a huge favor, hit the like button, subscribe, leave a five star review. It really helps us to be able to reach more people, grow this community as we get ready for the big 12 season in college football in general. We are less than 50 days away from the college football season kicking off. Technically, we're even closer to 40 days if you look at the week zero games, which do feature a big 12 matchup between Kansas State and Iowa State in Dublin. So we are getting very close to the college football season. I am getting super excited and I cannot wait to just enjoy the season, talk about the season, project the season, look at the rankings and just talk about what's going on in the landscape of the big 12. Now today is Tuesday, which means it is top five Tuesday. If you haven't joined the show before this year, first time, first off, welcome. So glad you're here with us. Top five Tuesday is when I take any topic. It can be super fun topic, be a little more serious topic and I just ranked the top five. Sometimes I go crazy and do with the top 16, but top five Tuesday is I pick a topic and do the top five or whatever it is. Last week was the top five destination cities in the big 12. I've done the top five stadiums. Top five non-conference games, top five Heisman trophy winners of all time, top five teams of all time. And we just talked about it and it's just and it's just a fun, not serious kind of show. Again, we're in the middle of summer. There is more breaking news than I expected there to be, but we still have breaking news every day. And so unless it's just absolutely I need to talk about this today. Tuesdays are reserved for these fun or more laid back shows. So with that, today's top five topic is the top five TV slots or a top five places where a game can land for you to watch. Now I'm not talking about going to the game. I'm not talking about anything related to that and the reason for that is because some of these time slots are actually very different than if you went to the game just as an example. Going to a 12 o'clock game isn't really all that fun. If you like to tailgate before the game, if you like to arrive a few hours before or even if you have to travel a couple of hours, you know, the big 12 is one of those conferences where if you're an Oklahoma State fan, you might live two or three hours away. If you're a Kansas fan, you probably live a couple of hours away, not all the schools are very centrally located to where their fan bases are. For example, I just look at teams like in the, you know, I just look at teams like LSU in Baton Rouge, well, most fans of LSU are probably within that area. Yes, you're going to get some in New Orleans. Yes, you're going to get some other parts of the state, but a lot of the fans, LSU fans are essentially located in Baton Rouge. You look at especially smaller conferences like Southern Mississippi. You're not going to get very many Southern Miss fans in central and northern Mississippi. Miami, most of Miami fans are in Miami. You don't get that as much within the big 12. There are some, for example, Utah is primarily a Salt Lake City market. I look at TCU. You're primarily going to get the Fort Worth area. Look at Texas Tech, you're mostly going to get Lubbock. But for a lot of the teams in the big 12, it's just such a large geographical area that the fan base covers that, you know, having a 12 o'clock kickoff may be great for TV viewers, but it may be terrible for the fan who wants to travel three hours to the game and now has to leave at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning just to make it to the game an hour before kickoff begins before kickoff. So as I go through this list, this is going to be again, top five TV slots for viewing a game. And I also realized that there's going to be some differentiation with in terms of if you are on the east coast versus if you're on the west coast. There is a time during the cultural wall season. Arizona doesn't do daylight savings. And so there's a time during the season when UCF is at 10 o'clock PM Eastern and Arizona is at six o'clock PM Eastern. What I'm basing these off of though is central daylight time. The reason I chose that is because most not not most, but the highest amount of teams are in the central time zone. You have all the Texas schools, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State, and I believe Iowa State as well are all in the central time zone. So as I go through these, I am going off of that again, just because I feel that's the most centralized. Also most schools are either one hour before one hour after that with an exception, with an exception to the Arizona schools for part of the year. And that's only part of the year half the season there with the mountain half the season they're in the mountain time zone as well. And so I'm going central for that reason. I do read off these time slots. They will be based on Eastern time zone, but just again, no, I am critiquing. I am making these when I did my research, I was doing it with the assumption that you are a team or a fan base in the central time zone. Before we begin, normally do an honorable mention. Today, I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to do the worst three. The worst three time slots you can have as a team in the big 12. Now, another thing I want to say before I begin this, I'm only doing big 12 TV slots. So the big 12 does not play on Wednesday nights as great as action is, which might be going away by the way. As great as action is, it's great as a Thursday night game is, I'm not going to be covering those because you don't see big 12 teams playing that slot. You might see them playing that slot if they have an away game and the TV rights go to the home team, but the big 12 does not have a TV contract where they play or host a game on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Tuesday. I think there's even Tuesday night games now. So those time slots aren't even going to be discussed. All right, number three, the third worst time slot. TNT, 1030 PM Eastern. This is a new time slot. This is a, this is the first year where TNT is really getting involved with college football. And here's why I put them dead last. First off, it's really, really late. It's 10 30 PM on the East Coast. It's 8 30 in the mountain time zone. It's 11, sorry, it's 9 30 in central time. Most people, most common fans aren't turning on a game at 9 30 PM. They might be finishing a game. They might be in the middle of their game, but they're not going to be just casually channel surfing and come across. Oh, look, there's a game starting at 9 30 PM. Let me turn it on. The common fan isn't going to do that very often. Additionally, it's on TNT. Now, I think TNT is going to be a fantastic TV partner. I think they're going to be a TV partner that could potentially bring a lot more revenue to the big 12. But today in 2025, as we go into the 2025 season, TNT and college football are not associating with each other. They're not synonymous of each other. And so again, you're going to get your casual viewers. They're not going to come across TNT all that much. TNT is not the CW. There are already 10 steps ahead of that. The big 12 had a contract with the CW. They'd be in one of these worse three spots. And so TNT, while it's not known for college football, I think eventually it will be. I think eventually as they move further away from the NBA, I think that TNT could be becoming a major player in the big 12, especially because TNT, you think WWE, you think WrestleMania, you think TNT, it's all kind of that same brand. Big 12 is very close right now with WWE hosting different events in or around big 12 games throughout the season. And so I think TNT is going to get there, but I think for this year, I would want to avoid if at all possible the 10, 30 PM Eastern TNT spot. The second worst TV slot is ESPN 2, 330 Eastern. The reason for that is it's in the middle of the day. It's a terrible time slot. If you're in the central time zone again, this is the assumption that gets you starting the game at 2.30, it'll end around 6. So if you want to do a dinner, I don't really know how you're going to fit that in because you either are going to be cooking during the fourth quarter or eating during the fourth quarter, which means cooking during the third quarter, it ends at 6, which is late enough to where you're probably not going to go out and do anything else for the rest of the night because again, the game ends around 6 o'clock and it's also early enough to where you can't really be doing stuff all day before that. It's just an awkward time, it breaks up in the middle of the day. And also it's just not good because you have the 12 o'clock PM Eastern games. They're still finishing up when the 3.30 PM games kick off. And so let's say Michigan and Ohio State are playing. You want to watch the end of that game or you can turn over to ESPN 2 and see the start of the game that you're wanting to watch. Additionally, the game ends while the prime time games are getting started. It's just not a very good time slot also ESPN 2 at that time is probably the fourth or fifth highest ranked game during that time slot because you have the ABC game, you have the ESPN game. That's also when you have the CBS game for the big 10. And after that, you know, maybe there's an FS1 game going on that's also bigger. Sometimes there's a Fox game that's starting again. It's just not the time slot you want to be in. And number one, the worst time slot, no mystery here, anything streaming ESPN plus HBO Max. I'll even throw like FS2 on there because I realize FS2 is a channel, but not everybody has it. I don't remember any big 12 teams being on FS2 this past year, but I think they definitely could be. I think that's part of their contract. They could be slotted that kind of game. I think to get to that point, it would have to be like a one in seven versus a two in two and six kind of matchup, but you don't want to be on that. I'm not going to go into the streaming anymore. I just it's pretty obvious. You don't want your game to be streaming. You get the same three or four commercials over and over and over and over. I've actually often wondered why don't we speed up the streaming games because ESPN plus they're not making a lot of money off of TV ads during a streamed game. The radio runs the same ads over and over. Have you ever listened to a game on the radio? It is the same commercials over and over and over. It's miserable. You thought the cheese it's commercial is bad. Oh, wait until you hear the radio. Anyways, I don't know why those speed up those games. That's another side tangent of the conversation for another day, but the number one worst is streaming. And unfortunately, the big 12 does have some games that will be streamed this year on ESPN plus, especially during the non-conference. You see that a lot more. Unfortunately, we are getting TNT involved and so we're going to have less of those games streamed more games will be on TV. All right. So now let's get to the top five best TV slots. Number five and some of you are thinking of crazy for this 12 o'clock PM Eastern ESPN or ABC. It's an early game. So again, we're not we're not talking about fans have to drive the game. It's an early game. If you're in the central time zone, that's 11 o'clock. If you're in the mountain time zone, it's 10 o'clock. If you're in zone, it's 9 o'clock. It's really early. So you kind of can't do much in the morning. It does run through lunch, but you can also host a lunch. It is late enough even at 11 a.m. To where you can have people bring food, you know, they have the star of the first quarter or whatever. And then the second quarter or one or a half time, you can have a lunch and it's nice. It works. It is early, like I mentioned. So it kind of does limit what you can do in the mornings, but one nice thing is that it allows you to have the rest of your game. The game is over by 230 in central time. And then you have the rest of your evening. If you want if you're an avid college football fan, you will still get to watch all the prime time games. You have the entire afternoon. You have time to do what you need to do after the game is over and the game gets over pretty early. Now if your team loses, then that's rough. I've definitely been in that situation where the game ends. It's 230 and I'm sitting there going, well, now my day is going to be horrible and I'm not going to enjoy the rest of it. But if they win, then you kind of have a little bit of extra jump in your step, your little bit happier, happier and you get to just do stuff and enjoy your day. That's why that is number five. Number four, and this one is going to be very controversial with some people. And 15 p.m. Eastern on ESPN. Now I realize what I just said about TNT. Here's the difference. ESPN is a large enough channel where people will just tune in. They'll just turn on ESPN, you know, is there getting ready for better? Maybe they're just relaxing and want to watch a little bit more football for the day. They'll turn on ESPN because that's the main sports, sports channel. As a fan, you don't have to worry about channel flipping. It is your game and only your game. That can be good or bad. If you'd like to change the channel during commercials, watch something else, your options are very limited. I think there's like a CBS sports game, normally a mountain or West game or something at the same time. But primarily, it's that game and only that game. As somebody from the media, I love this time slot because I can give all my focus to this game because there's no other big 12 games going on. And it's any other time slot, there could be two, three, even four games going on. And there's a lot of channel flipping as a casual fan of college football, just trying to watch the best college football I can and watch the most that I can. There are times during some of these other time slots where I miss big moments because there's three other things going on and I can only be on one channel at once. The 1015 PM Eastern 915 Central A15 Mountain 715 Arizona or Pacific is a good time slot for having the focus on your team is also a good time slot for having the entire day to do whatever you want. You got yard work, you want to have a barbecue, you want to go out have fun with the kids, you want to go out with friends, whatever you want to do, you have all day to do that. You don't wake up early, you don't have to do anything college football related at all if you don't want to from the time you wake up until 930 PM Eastern or sorry 915 PM Eastern. Really it's 930 because it always gets slotted back due to other games. It's not the worst thing in the world, just saying it's not the worst thing in the world. Now it's not the best, you'll see there are three options that are much better and if I had to divide these top five I would say number five and number four kind of in their own little category then there's a massive gap to number three and then three two and one are all kind of in that same area as well. So yeah that's my number four 10 PM Eastern ESPN you're on the main channel all the attentions on you you get to have your entire day to do whatever you want you don't have to channel flip you don't have to worry about what's going on around college football. You know I feel like most fans are fans of college football and you want to see the Hail Mary catches you want to see the crazy plays going on in other games if you can but primarily you're going to be focusing on your favorite team your favorite game of the day and this lets you just do that and I love that. Alright number three again huge gap up to number three 730 PM Eastern on ESPN Friday night this is just like the 1015 PM Eastern slot that I just mentioned in that the entire college football world is focused on your game there's only one game going on normally sometimes there's a fox game but you get the you get the idea many weeks you are the only show to watch if you want to watch college football it is all on you. That a great time 730 PM Eastern 630 PM Central this is a little bit rough for my Pacific coast fans that could be a 430 PM kickoff that's rough but again for my central audience even my mountain west audience 630 PM it's just a good way to finish out your week you go to work you get home you have dinner and then you just get to start off your weekend with some great football on ESPN and then tomorrow on Saturday you can just enjoy the whole day do whatever you want you want to watch college football day you can be a casual college football fan all day and not have a thought about your favorite team if they win you're happy you're watching all the other games you see okay how is this going to affect the rankings how is this going to affect the conference standings you can just enjoy it and if they lose well then you can hey watch all day and say I hope they lose too I hope they lose as well I hope that team doesn't win and you can just again do that or just say you know I'm done with college football for right now until next week and then just live your life do what you need to do on Saturday I love Friday night games absolutely love Friday night games big 12 has a lot of them this year I believe they have five or six that are slotted to be played and I plan on watching all of them I plan on watching all six of those games because it's just a good warm up for Saturday number two 12 p.m. Eastern Newt Big noon kickoff just like what I said with number five I think it's an okay slot I like college football under the lights I feel like most people do I feel like college football should be in under the light sport I would love to see Ohio State and Michigan play under the lights sometimes instead of always being at eleven o'clock east or eleven o'clock central but it's not a bad kickoff time and also it's a huge game if you get the big noon kickoff time slot that means that Fox is essentially saying you are the biggest game of the day for our TV markets that's a big deal that's a really big deal because as much as I love being under the lights in prime time and all that there's something about Fox saying you are number one game we're going to give you this slot and they they own it they say our best game is going to be twelve o'clock we're going to end our preview show and take you right to their biggest game last year there was a couple teams who got this great games Gus Johnson love him or hate him he's a great voice he's very emotional he gets a lot of energy on the broadcast I like big noon kickoff games now I don't want to see my team play on them every single week and I won't because there's only one and they they choose you know different games are going to do but it's a good time slot and again the game ends at two thirty central you have the rest of the day to do what you want sure you lose your morning be of the rest of the day do it do what you want and that's not a terrible thing my number one seven thirty p.m. Eastern ABC on a Saturday night this is the prime time game of the week unless you're in the big time ESPN ABC they choose their biggest game and they play it on 7th 30 p.m. Eastern on ABC this is the Kurt Herbstreet Restavers game I think they're the best duo in all of college football you have massive audience around the country this is the game that people tune into this is the game where every single casual football fan is going to be sitting down and watching as long as their own team is playing at the time and also it's just a great time slot it is late enough in at night to where you can do that tailgate party or the bar be que whatever it is started at 6 30 p.m. Central started at 6 p.m. Central game starts at 6 30 p.m. Central and it actually ends at a decent time the game will be over by about 10 o'clock that's not the worst thing in the world that will finish out your day finish the game at 10 o'clock your days finished and you're able to kind of live your life in the morning a little bit you know do what you do in the morning have your normal afternoon routine and then leading up to the game you just finish your day with college football you finish it but it is planned right it's not like the 10 15 game where you can literally do a regular day and then still end with college football the 7th 30 p.m. kick off 6 30 central allows you to have your normal day but then plan college football to end your day and I absolutely love that I love this time slot I think it's the perfect time slot for college football it's under the lights sometimes early in the season you get the sun sets and it just looks really cool in the TV to see the field see it go under the lights it is where magic happens in my opinion in college football there is no better time slot no better channel no better team to and no better commentators than what you get at the 7 30 p.m. Eastern ABC Saturday night game so what do you think do you agree with my rankings again I'm gonna go through them number 5 12 p.m. Eastern Saturday morning ESPN number 4 10 p.m. 10 15 p.m. Eastern on ESPN number 3 7 30 p.m. Eastern on Friday night ESPN number 2 12 o'clock p.m. big noon kickoff on Fox and number 1 7 30 p.m. Eastern on ABC Saturday night if you agree with these rankings let me know if you disagree let me know I will not listen to you if you say streaming I'm sorry you're wrong stream is the worst you say ESPN 2 at 3 30 I'm not going to entertain that either if you think in other time slots better let me know we can have that conversation I'd love to hear why you think it's better or if why you think my rankings are wrong I love to have that conversation just kind of pick your brain a little bit follow me on x first and 12 first and x i i be happy to have that conversation with there as well please give it a follow I'm always posting stuff about the big 12 college football in general and there's always stuff going on there's always have going on I got a fun show plan tomorrow but it looks like there might be some breaking news so we'll be talking about that as well until tomorrow have a great day Bye. Bye.[silence]