Why does South Carolina football host more night games than Clemson? We asked

The announcements for Sept. 23 kickoff times hit social media a mere two minutes apart last Monday. But the reactions from college football fans in the Palmetto State weren’t as in sync.

Clemson was hosting Florida State at noon on ABC, South Carolina was hosting Mississippi State at 7:30 p.m. on SEC Network — and Tigers and Gamecocks fans reacted online with frustration and excitement, respectively.

From the Clemson side: “Noon? Oh brother.” ... “Absolutely bull crap.” ... “NO WAY STOP.”

From the South Carolina side: “Let’s get it.” ... “Love to see it.” ... “WOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

The general consensus, gleaned from a sampling of comments on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) was clear: Fans prefer night games over noon games. Given that Clemson-USC is the state’s premier rivalry and comparison is the thief of joy, each team’s time slot also became a talking point.

Clemson-Florida State was once billed as the ACC’s game of the year and an ESPN “College GameDay” lock. Then the preseason No. 9 Tigers lost their season opener at Duke, dropped out of the AP Top 25 and scored a noon ABC kickoff against the No. 4 Seminoles.

South Carolina, meanwhile, got a 7:30 p.m. SEC Network kickoff against Mississippi State in a matchup of unranked teams, continuing a trend of night games in Williams-Brice Stadium that was in full force last season.

With both of those Week 4 games now on deck for Saturday, The State spoke with officials at both schools for a better grasp on what goes into weekly kickoff times and how much they and their conferences can influence those decisions.

The consensus for how much input they have? Not much.

Who determines kickoff times?

In simplest terms, major television networks pay conferences such as the ACC and SEC millions of dollars for the right to set their game times.

That’s the case for lots of televised sports, including men’s and women’s basketball, but it’s most prominent for football given the limited number of games and the sport’s immense national appeal and profitability.

The ACC’s primary rightsholder is ESPN, which broadcasts the conference’s top games on ESPN and ABC and will do so through 2036. The conference is also airing games on The CW Network this year under a new partnership, and the ACC Network naturally gets a share.

The SEC was synonymous with CBS for years, and that network still has first pick for SEC games this season, followed by ESPN and SEC Network in that order. But that’ll change next year as the conference enters a 10-year, roughly $3 billion contract with ESPN to make that family of networks the exclusive rightsholder of SEC football.

Executives at those networks, more than anyone else, are responsible for determining weekly football kick times during the season with a “point person” or two in each conference providing context, feedback and collaboration.

“Broadcast partners set the game kickoff times and notify Clemson typically 12 days in advance of the game,” said Jeff Kallin, a school athletic department spokesman. “Clemson doesn’t select the game times.”

“It’s really, for the most part, a network decision where the conference will help facilitate and work with them on selections,” added Charles Bloom, a South Carolina athletic department spokesman who spent 17 years working for the SEC.

Clemson and USC learn kickoff times for their first three games of each season early in the summer — this year, the SEC and ACC both announced those times May 31 — but after that, they’re just as in the dark as the common fan.

Once networks determine game times in collaboration with the conferences, they generally inform member schools Monday morning or afternoon of when their football teams will be playing the following Saturday (12 days later). Schools learn those kickoffs about an hour before the times are formally released so they can prep their own announcements.

“In this case, the Mississippi State game’s on the 23rd and we found out on the 11th,” Bloom said. “And that’s how it works mostly during the season. Monday late morning or early afternoon is when we hear. We don’t really have much influence in those decisions.”

‘Just tell us when’

Even with those decisions being made weekly in a vacuum, they stack up over time in terms of time slots. Research on Clemson and South Carolina indicates as much.

USC, since the start of the 2020 season, has played 16 of its 21 home games at night, according to research from The State.

That means fans have been getting 7 p.m. kickoffs (or later) at a 76% clip in Columbia’s Williams-Brice Stadium in that span, with only five of those games kicking off in either a noon or afternoon time slot.

Clemson, in that same four-year stretch, has played 16 of 22 home games during the day, a 72% rate of kickoffs in either noon or afternoon time slots.

Clemson has only kicked off at 7 p.m. or later seven times at home since 2020. Last year, during the Tigers’ 10-2 regular season, Clemson played five of its seven home games at Memorial Stadium in a day time slot.

South Carolina, in comparison, kicked off five of seven home games at 7 p.m. or later last season during an 8-4 regular season under coach Shane Beamer.

There are a few ways to look at those splits.

Most notably, the impact of channel placement versus time slot placement can’t be lost. Bloom remembers how in the early days of his athletic administration career that simply having a game televised was a huge deal.

“When a TV truck pulled into your stadium, it was a big game,” he said. “No matter where it aired, no matter what time it aired, your game was on television. Now, the expectations have changed. ... It used to be, ‘Boy is our game on TV?’ and now it’s ‘OK, well what time and what network is it on?’ ”

With that comes the power of so-called traditional channels.

Clemson’s noon kickoff against Florida State, for example, may mean an earlier Friday bedtime or Saturday wakeup for fans and tailgaters.

But from an exposure perspective, the ABC channel placement is a win. Even with the growth of streaming services, linear TV channels — think traditional over-the-air cable channels such as ABC, ESPN and CBS — still deliver massive viewer counts for programs (in Week 1, Clemson-Duke averaged 4.39 million viewers on ESPN and South Carolina-UNC averaged 3.4 million on ABC). And they’re more established and recognized than such channels as ACC Network and SEC Network.

Framed that way, with the understanding that time slots might matter more to fans and TV placement could matter more to school administrators, day games versus night games can feel more like an apples and oranges comparison.

Clemson and South Carolina officials agreed: Though each time slot may present different pros and cons in terms of gameday logistics, there isn’t a bad option, per se.

Clemson coach Dabo Swinney feels the same way.

“Just tell us when we’re going to play,” he said. “I enjoy having a chance to compete and play regardless of whatever time it is. Just tell us when we’re going to play. We don’t control that, so I don’t spend much time worrying about that.”

Part of the game

Days later, Swinney acknowledged Clemson fans’ disappointment in Saturday’s early kickoff time against Florida State.

“We’re gonna need ’em,” he said Monday on his radio show. “I know they — the crowd — don’t really like noon games. But hey, we’ve gotta play whenever they say play. We need to show up and this needs to be an awesome environment. I don’t have any doubt it will be.”

“The crowd, I know they don’t really like noon games,” he said Monday on his radio show. “But hey, we’ve gotta show up and play when they say play. ... I have no doubt it’ll be a great environment.”

Which raises the question: If a school found itself on the wrong side of a long stretch of kickoff time decisions and wanted to raise a stink, what could it actually do?

Once again, the answer is not much. There is no formal complaint process regarding kickoff times for ACC or SEC schools, though there are informal options in both leagues. When Bloom worked in the SEC, he said network executives would routinely attend the league’s spring meetings to meet with school leaders, take questions and potentially make adjustments.

“In the SEC, the lines of communication between the network, the conference and the schools have always been there,” he said. “If there’s ever an issue from, ‘Hey, I don’t like what somebody said on the air’ to the game time to ‘You showed my player in the (injury) tent when you didn’t need to,’ there’s always that opportunity for schools to raise an issue.”

Schools do have opportunities to provide formal offseason feedback, but that’s limited to special circumstances and once again comes down to a network determination.

Bloom said South Carolina, for years, would request for its home football game that lined up with the annual State Fair held adjacent to Williams-Brice Stadium to kick off later in the day to space out crowds.

Kallin said ACC TV partners have also honored Clemson’s long-standing request to not play any home games on weekdays on account of the logistical challenges that come with hosting a “top-tier football event” while also accounting for traveling fans, university operations and local businesses in a small city.

Clemson hasn’t hosted a midweek home game in over a decade but, as a result of that request, has played a number of such road games, including back-to-back Labor Day season openers at Georgia Tech in 2022 and Duke in 2023.

The Tigers have racked up night games thanks to their run of six straight ACC championships and College Football Playoff appearances from 2015-20 (with two national championships in that span). Those games just haven’t happened at Memorial Stadium at a consistent rate recently.

Clemson is 47-10 in 57 night games played since 2015. The team is also 28-7 in night games since 2018 and, last year, played the second most single-season night games (eight) in program history.

It’s all a trade-off, Bloom said. South Carolina found itself in a run of noon games several years ago that rankled fans. Now the Gamecocks are getting a lot of prime-time placements with a variety of channels.

After four games this season, they’ll have appeared on four different channels: ABC, CBS, SEC Network and SEC Network Plus (the network’s streaming-only channel that every school must play a non-conference game on annually).

One week, a school might get a night game on a secondary channel. Another week, it might be a noon game on a premier channel. Either way, there’s not much time to dwell on it, as schools pivot almost immediately into gameday logistics once they get their next-week kickoff times 12 days out.

And, of course, networks paying for the right to manipulate schedules gives schools exposure on their channels. A nice chunk of change also flows back to them in the form of ACC and SEC conference payouts, which include TV revenue and help Clemson and South Carolina offset millions in football spending.

“I think it’s the college television experience,” Bloom said.

Even if it comes with the occasional 6 a.m. Saturday wakeup.