College Football Fans Unhappy With 11 PM Local Start Time This Season

Rutgers fans, load up on coffee on Oct. 25. Because you'll need it.

Fox revealed its Friday night Big Ten schedule for the 2024 regular season, and it features Rutgers traveling to USC on Oct. 25 for an 8 p.m. Pacific Time start. For the Scarlet Knights faithful who can't afford a cross-country flight and plan to watch at home, that means they'll have to stay up for an 11 p.m. ET kick-off.

Game 1 of the World Series is the same evening, explaining the late kick, according to The Athletic . Still, the scheduling quirk shows one of the problems of college conferences ignoring basic geographical principles in pursuit of a larger payday.

Brian Fonseca, the Rutgers beat reporter for NJ Advance Media/The Star Ledger, wrote that it was one of "the consequences of adding west coast teams to the Big Ten."

"Rutgers fans need to watch games at 11 PM EST now?! Yeah, this whole B1G experiment is not lasting lmfao," one critical fan predicted.

"11pm??? Yall better get a dub if I’m staying up til 2am," one fan warned.

Another commenter looked at things from a player's perspective, which conference commissioners likely never did when creating these monstrous mega-conferences.

"ending a game at 2 am local time is NUTS body clocks on the players are screwed," the account predicted.