John Kosner Spoke with Stewart Mandel of The New York Times about Dave Portnoy, Fox, and The Big Ten
Original Article: The Athletic, by Stewart Mandel, September 18th, 2025
By Stewart Mandel, Andrew Marchand and Scott Dochterman
On Dec. 21, the day Ohio State hosted Tennessee in its first-round College Football Playoff game, Barstool Sports founder and Michigan diehard Dave Portnoy posted a video on Instagram showing a plane flying a banner that read, “EXTEND RYAN DAY #GOBLUE!” Ohio State’s head coach had just lost to the Wolverines for a fourth straight season.
The camera then panned to Portnoy, who was standing on a street across from Ohio Stadium, watching the plane.
“Who would ever come up with that?” he said with a chuckle. He turned to the camera to reveal he was wearing a maize and blue hoodie bearing the same message. (Day did end up getting an extension — after his Buckeyes won the national championship.)
Eight months later, on Aug. 30, Portnoy was outside the Horseshoe again, for Ohio State’s season opener against Texas, but this time not by choice. As part of a partnership with Barstool announced in July, the controversial media personality was to become a regular on Fox’s “Big Noon Kickoff” pregame show, which broadcasts its last hour inside the stadium of the network’s marquee game.
Portnoy wasn’t part of that in-stadium portion because, he said in a video, he was “banned” by Ohio State, echoing a report from earlier in the week by Front Office Sports. Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork disputed that claim, saying it was a Fox decision. And the Big Ten said it was told that Portnoy would not be part of any in-stadium segments at its schools.
If so, that’s news to Portnoy.
“My understanding is every stadium, I will be welcomed in, with the exception of one,” he told The Athletic this week. (Portnoy is also expected at Saturday’s marquee Big 12 matchup, Texas Tech at Utah, as Barstool Sports continues to discuss a partnership with that conference.)
The Big Ten is Fox’s most important college sports partner, while Ohio State is the most highly watched brand whose games the network broadcasts. Fox is the Big Ten’s most important partner as well: The company not only pays the league’s members billions of dollars but, through an unusual arrangement, controls the entirety of the conference’s media rights at least through 2032.
From the outside, they appear to be unaligned, not just about Portnoy but about larger scheduling concerns that rankle many fans, although league members readily agreed to them. All parties involved don’t have a choice but to coexist for at least the next seven years.
As Penn State AD Pat Kraft said last year amid fan backlash over kickoff times, “To be very honest, we signed up for this.”
Many of the same Buckeyes fans who booed Portnoy during his WWE-style segment outside the Horseshoe already harbored resentment toward Fox over the network putting so many Ohio State games in its noon ET window. Penn State fans similarly erupted when the Nittany Lions’ biggest home games of the year were not played at night, when Beaver Stadium prefers to conduct its traditional “White Out.”
Many fans feel prime-time games create a better atmosphere, not to mention seven more hours to tailgate.
“Our program, our fans, deserve some marquee night games,” Bjork said in June.
The Big Ten disputes that there’s any friction between itself and Fox.
“It’s that value of just being a true joint venture partnership. It’s not entirely one way, where it’s conference-owned, or the other way, where it’s network-owned,” Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny said. “It just comes back to that one word: partnership.”
Barstool previously partnered with Fox Sports’ rival, ESPN, in 2017, for a TV version of its popular podcast “Pardon My Take,” but Disney-owned ESPN canceled it after one episode following backlash from some employees.
“While we had approval on the content of the show, I erred in assuming we could distance our efforts from the Barstool site and its content,” then-ESPN president John Skipper said at the time.
Barstool’s brand is one thing. Portnoy’s Michigan fandom could also be seen as a conflict of interest by Ohio State. Last year he claimed to have facilitated five-star quarterback Bryce Underwood’s recruiting flip from LSU to Michigan. Earlier this month he tweeted at five-star Ohio State receiver commit Chris Henry Jr. about Oracle, the company founded by Larry Ellison, who, along with his wife, Jolin, funded Underwood’s name, image and likeness deal.
“What a cluster!” said a high-ranking Power 4 administrator. “Why would Fox do that to their partner? Especially a school that might be their No. 1 property in college sports. Makes no sense!”
Fox notified both the Big Ten and the NFL about its Barstool deal ahead of its announcement, said sources briefed on the conversations. Portnoy, a New England Patriots fan, was highly critical of commissioner Roger Goodell during the “DeflateGate” saga and sold T-shirts with the commissioner’s image sporting a clown’s nose. Fox Sports declined to comment, while Kenny told The Athletic, “There’s been enough written, and I think even attributed to the Big Ten publicly on this one, where we’re not going to have any additional comment on it.”
Fox Sports views Portnoy as an antagonistic Michigan fan whose clear partisan presence on the show is comparable to that of former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, sources briefed on Fox Sports’ internal discussions said. Though Meyer has coached at several prominent colleges, he most recently was with the Buckeyes, where he won a national title in 2014.
“Barstool is good for the Big Ten, good for Fox Sports obviously,” said Portnoy. “I think 99 percent of the fan bases understand what we do.”
This is not the first time Fox has toed a line with one of its league partners. It previously hired Pete Rose, then serving a lifetime ban from baseball, and Alex Rodriguez, suspended for a year for PED use, on its Major League Baseball studio shows. And it seems unconcerned that No. 1 NFL game analyst Tom Brady is sitting in the coaches booth at Las Vegas Raiders games in his role as a minority owner.
“Even though we pay large rights fees and we are investment partners/equity partners with the Big Ten and the Big Ten Network, we do view ourselves as kind of the unpaid marketing arm for all of our partners,” Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said this week at an FOS conference when asked about the Barstool deal. “We use our best judgment for what we think can make their sports more popular.”
Meanwhile, Fox defends putting its biggest games at noon with a simple explanation: The strategy, which began in 2019, results in tremendous ratings. That Aug. 30 matchup of No. 1 Texas at No. 3 Ohio State drew 16.6 million viewers, the biggest Week 1 audience on record, dating back to 1993. Fox was willing to move that game to Sunday in prime time, but Texas refused.
Most pertinently, as Shanks referenced, the network is paying the Big Ten a whole lot of money. The conference’s current rights deal, which includes sublicensed packages on CBS and NBC, was the first in college sports history to reach $1 billion a year. That’s in addition to revenue from BTN, in which Fox is the majority stakeholder.
“I don’t think we, or the conference, should apologize for the fact that they have the richest media rights deal in college football,” Fox Sports executive Michael Mulvihill told The Athletic in May.
“The conference is having more success than it’s had, really, at any time in my lifetime. And I recognize that that model can create moments where there’s frustration for a specific fan base. But on the whole, the Big Ten is more competitive than ever, because we’ve got three big companies involved in the media rights.”
TV networks have long held more contractual power in college sports than in pro sports, where one league controls all the rights. That’s most evident in how the networks dictate college kickoff times, sometimes with as little as six days’ notice. The NFL’s TV partners collectively pay many more billions than they do for college rights, yet the league still largely dictates when games are played.
“There’s been a move by the schools to try to lock in as much revenue as possible for as long as possible, and that often involves ceding some amounts of control,” said former ESPN and NBA executive John Kosner.
But Fox has a unique level of control over the Big Ten due to the nature of its contracts.
In 2017, the Big Ten, then under commissioner Jim Delany, began what was reported at the time as a six-year, $2.64 billion deal with Fox and ESPN, in which Fox paid $50 million a year more than ESPN to get the first choice of games (i.e., Ohio State-Michigan).
Undisclosed at the time, though, was that as part of a larger deal, Fox, through its ownership stake in Big Ten Network, took control of the conference’s entire broadcasting rights, which it could then sublicense if it so chose. Fox, not the conference itself, holds the authority to determine which other networks get to show Big Ten games. And the deal was for 15 years, so Fox will be the lead negotiator again when the CBS and NBC deals come up in 2030.
The arrangement caused awkwardness when ESPN’s share of the package came up for renegotiations six years into the deal. Rival networks had to walk into meetings and pitch not just to then-Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren but also to Fox Sports president/COO Mark Silverman and executive VP Larry Jones, who were technically the lead negotiators.
“It’s fairly unprecedented in my career, where you have one network that was on both sides of the deal that way,” said Kosner.
Fox theoretically could have kept all those games for itself, but Warren, who came to the league from the Minnesota Vikings, wanted an NFL-like setup with exclusive early afternoon, late afternoon and prime-time windows for three different networks. Fox played ball, cutting out ABC/ESPN and instead licensing a 3:30 p.m. package to CBS (replacing the network’s SEC package) and a new prime-time game to NBC. It was reported at the time that CBS and NBC were paying the conference an average of $350 million a year each. In reality, they are paying to sublicense those rights from Fox.
Meanwhile, during the COVID-19-impacted 2020-21 school year when the Big Ten’s revenue plummeted, Warren raised an estimated $100 million by selling Fox an additional 10 percent stake in BTN. Which means Fox owns 61 percent of the entity that controls the conference’s media rights.
And Fox calls the shots when it comes to scheduling. Fox launched the “Big Noon Kickoff” franchise in 2019 in order to place its best game in a window with the least competition. It eventually became the most-watched Saturday window on any network. At that time, Fox still shared the Big Ten’s best games with ABC/ESPN, which aired its best Big Ten games at night. Fox also still had rights to Texas and Oklahoma, then in the Big 12, which helped spread out which schools played in the noon window.
In the current deal, Fox holds the Big Ten’s top three picks as well as five of the top 11, and it has exclusive rights to the noon window (CBS and NBC cannot air a Big Ten game then unless in a swap with Fox). In 2024, the first full year of the arrangement, Ohio State played five of its eight home games in that window, much to the chagrin of some spectators. The league and network consider last year’s situation an anomaly; fans worry it’s the start of a trend.
“Whether or not a team appears in prime time for four or five straight weeks, or at noon for four or five straight weeks, there’s no intent from any network partner or the conference to really line up the schedule in that way,” said Kenny. “It’s all up to the process that’s laid out within our draft process with our multiple partners that we have.”
It wasn’t that long ago that many Big Ten schools didn’t want night games, especially when the weather turns colder. Prior to the current deal, the networks needed approval from both schools to place a game at night after the first week of November. Ohio State and Michigan still have those exemptions, while Michigan is also exempt from playing on Friday night.
Those are only some of the factors complicating Fox’s role. The weekend of Nov. 9, 2024, illustrated the tricky task of selecting marquee games. The Big Ten had six games that weekend, but one, Iowa at UCLA, moved to Friday night. Penn State fans demanded an annual “White Out” night game, so the Big Ten worked with NBC to place Penn State-Washington on Peacock. CBS had the week’s top selection and opted for Michigan at Indiana.
That left only three games, and one, Maryland at Oregon, could not kick off at 9 a.m. PT. Fox’s choices were Minnesota at Rutgers and last-place Purdue at Ohio State. It picked the latter.
“What we’re asking for is just a little more flexibility,” Bjork said in a preseason interview with Ohio Public Radio. “Why does every one of our games have to be at noon?”
And now one school, Michigan State, is dealing with the opposite problem. Spartans fans were furious to learn last week that Fox would air their team’s Sept. 20 game at USC at 11 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT, which means it won’t end until after 2 a.m. in Michigan.
Every conference’s TV deals are different. For example, as part of the SEC’s current deal with ESPN, which began last year, the network must announce before the season which games will air in the early window each week so fans can plan accordingly.
Kosner says if Big Ten schools wanted more control over kickoff times — or veto power over Fox hiring Portnoy — they could have prioritized those details when the conference negotiated its contract. Instead, they’ve spawned a situation where the weekly Monday morning reveal of next week’s kickoff times can spawn controversy and backlash.
“Fox negotiated for the rights to put its best games at 12 noon on Saturday,” he said. “They negotiated for the rights to have whatever talent they want on the air. If it meant so much to the Big Ten and the schools, those are points that could have been negotiated.
“But then perhaps they would have gotten less money.”
