Fox has pulled Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sports off “Big Noon Kickoff.” Portnoy says Ohio State and Ryan Day forced the move. The record says Ohio State had reasons to want him gone, and that Portnoy is a poor witness to his own exit.
The Athletic reported Friday that Portnoy and Barstool will no longer appear on the Fox pregame show, ending a partnership that began in July 2025. Sources told the outlet there was no single breaking incident. The strain of pairing Fox’s traditional desk with Barstool’s style had become unsustainable, especially inside a Big Ten rights deal that is worth enormous money to the network.
Portnoy did not wait for the story. He wrote on X that he had been told he was being “put on ice,” and he assigned the blame before he had read the article.
“Ohio State and Ryan Day bitched and moaned to the Big 10 and threatened Fox till they had no choice,” he wrote. “Juice wasn’t worth the squeeze and frankly I don’t blame them. Huge dollars at stake and you have Cryin Ryan throwing temper tantrums and making threats every few days on something I said.”
He called Day soft, said Barstool’s college football show will continue, and added that he does not blame Day for earlier separations from WEEI, ESPN or the NFL. He does blame him for this one.
That is a narrator with a stake in the ending. Portnoy is a Michigan fan and one of the loudest Michigan boosters in the country. Ohio State is not a neutral setting for him. It is the content. A decision that sources describe as a programming problem becomes, in his telling, proof that a rival coach is a coward. Those are not the same claim, and only one of them has an independent source behind it.
Ohio State officials referred questions to Fox. Fox declined to comment. The school has previously disputed reports that it interfered with Portnoy’s role. Athletic director Ross Bjork pushed back more than once last year on claims that Portnoy had been banned from Ohio Stadium.
According to The Athletic, Ohio State told Fox that if Portnoy were part of the show during last week’s visit to Columbus for the game against Illinois, the school would give Fox personnel no access. That is the piece of his account with outside reporting behind it. The rest, that Day personally campaigned, that the complaints were constant temper tantrums, that Fox had “no choice” — is Portnoy summarizing a story he said he had not yet seen.
Ohio State’s objection is not hard to reconstruct.
Portnoy’s first “Big Noon Kickoff” appearance was in Columbus, on Aug. 30, 2025, ahead of Ohio State-Texas. He walked out to boos, sang “The Victors,” and peeled off a Big Ten hoodie to reveal a Michigan shirt that read “Still Can’t Beat Michigan.” He called Ohio State fans morons, mocked the sign-stealing death-penalty talk, and told them their national title meant nothing because the rivalry still ran through Ann Arbor. Urban Meyer handed him an Ohio State jersey with “El Presidente” on the back. Portnoy answered with the fight song.
That is what Fox hired. It is also what a host school is asked to absorb when the network’s pregame show sets up on its campus, then moves inside its stadium for the final hour. Ohio State is not an occasional “Big Noon” stop. It is one of the show’s home kitchens. A Michigan booster whose segment is the troll is a recurring access problem, not a one-week bit.
The personal campaign against Day makes the institutional complaint easier to understand, not harder. Portnoy has called him “Cryin Ryan” and a “scared little chicken boy.” After Ohio State blew a 23-3 lead and lost to Texas last month, he said Day had lucked into a national title, called that title “the worst thing that ever happened to Ohio State,” and labeled him one of the worst big-game coaches alive. He said new Michigan coach Kyle Whittingham was “going to eat this guy for lunch.” This is a paid Fox contributor, on a Big Ten partner’s air, using the rival coach as a weekly character.
A school in that position has ordinary reasons to complain. It has to grant the network field, campus and personnel access. It does not have to host a booster from Ann Arbor whose product is humiliating the head coach on the way in. Fox, which needs Ohio State more than it needs a recurring heel segment, had ordinary reasons to decide the segment was not worth the argument. Portnoy himself conceded the second point. “Juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” he wrote. “Frankly I don’t blame them.”
Beginning Saturday in Minneapolis, for Michigan at Minnesota, Fox’s main desk is host Rob Stone with Meyer, Matt Leinart, Brady Quinn and Mark Ingram II. “Wake-Up Barstool” on FS1 is unaffected. The two sides could still build other programming.
