SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2026
Let’s rewind the tape. Not to a coach freezing on the headset, not to a kicker shanking one at the gun, and not to a fan base melting down over a call. Rewind it to a microphone, where the loudest self-appointed authority in college football media confessed, on his own show, that he did not know one of the sport’s most famous games was a rivalry at all. Pro Football Network reported on Saturday that Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, admitted on the Barstool College Football Show that he was unfamiliar with the history behind Alabama’s rivalry with Tennessee. He questioned whether Tennessee was a bigger Alabama rival than LSU. And then he said the quiet part into the microphone: he had texted former Crimson Tide running back Mark Ingram to confirm what Alabama’s biggest rivalries even are. Understand who is talking here. This is not a casual fan at the end of the bar. Weeks ago, Portnoy was sitting behind a national pregame desk on Fox. The man was credentialed as a voice of the sport, on the sport’s biggest Saturday stage, and the Third Saturday in October had to be explained to him like it was a rumor.
The fans did the fact-check in real time, and they were not gentle about it, because the fans are never the problem in this story — they are the receipts. Pro Football Network collected the reaction on X, and it reads like a peer review. One fan wrote, “Dave Portnoy didn’t know Alabama Tennessee was a rivalry…. Man, are we even doing at this point.” Another put the whole indictment in eight words: “You cover sports & don’t know sports. Pathetic.” A third viewer landed the line that follows Portnoy around for the rest of this segment: “Until a couple weeks ago, this is someone that Fox deemed credible enough to sit behind a desk and deliver commentary on this sport.” That is not a fan base being cruel. That is an audience doing the vetting that a network hiring operation was supposed to do before it handed over the desk. Punch up, always: the verdict in this story is not for the people in Knoxville and Tuscaloosa who have lived this fixture their whole lives. It is for the man who got paid to talk about their sport without knowing its calendar, and for the operation that put him there.
The rivalry he had to have explained
So let us do for the record what a text message had to do for Dave Portnoy. Alabama and Tennessee first met on November 28, 1901, The Tennessean reported in its October 15 history of the fixture, and the first game ended in a 6–6 tie. By 1939 the game had settled into its October date and sportswriters had given it the name it still carries: the Third Saturday in October. It is not a nickname fans invented last season. It is the fixture’s actual name, printed on calendars for the better part of a century. The Tennessean reported that Alabama led the series 60–40–7 entering this season, that the teams have split the last four meetings — Tennessee winning 52–49 in 2022 and 24–17 in 2024, Alabama winning 34–20 in 2023 and 37–20 in 2025 — and that the series has run in long streaks of dominance on both sides, including Alabama’s 15 straight wins from 2007 to 2021 and Tennessee’s seven straight from 1995 to 2001. Pro Football Network’s account of the admission lays out the same history, because everybody who covers this sport knows it by heart. Everybody, apparently, except the man Fox put on the pregame desk.
And then there are the cigars, because this rivalry does not just have a name, it has a smell. The winning team lights victory cigars after this game, a custom Pro Football Network noted is commonly traced to Alabama’s 1961 win over Tennessee. The Tennessean filled in the detail: Alabama athletic trainer Jim Goostree, who had earlier worked at Tennessee, handed out the cigars after that 1961 victory. A tradition old enough to collect a pension, attached to a game old enough to have started with a tie in 1901, and the founder of a sports media empire needed a former player to confirm over text that it belongs on Alabama’s list of rivalries at all. There is homework, and then there is showing up to the exam asking the student next to you what class this is.
He texted a man who sits on the desk he lost
Here is the detail that turns an embarrassing clip into a perfect one. The expert Portnoy texted, Mark Ingram, is not a random former player in his contacts. Field Level Media reported on October 3 that the Big Noon Kickoff desk going forward consists of Urban Meyer, Matt Leinart, Brady Quinn, Mark Ingram II and host Rob Stone. Read that again. The running back Portnoy had to ask about Alabama’s rivalries is a working analyst on the very Fox pregame show Portnoy was just removed from. The knowledge was sitting one chair over the whole time he had the job. He could have absorbed it by osmosis at the desk. Instead it arrived the way it arrived this week: by text, after the show, from a colleague who actually knows the sport’s history because he played in it.
And the removal itself is why this clip detonated instead of drifting by. Saturday Down South reported, via The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, that Portnoy and Barstool Sports will no longer appear on Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff, that Portnoy and other Barstool personalities such as Dan “Big Cat” Katz had been part of the show for a little over a year, and that Fox Sports declined to comment. Marchand’s reporting, as Saturday Down South summarized it, found no single reason for the abrupt timing beyond this: the constant challenge of uniting Fox’s traditional pregame show with Barstool’s persona proved unsustainable. The wider Fox relationship is not over — Wake Up Barstool still airs weekdays on FS1 — but the Saturday desk experiment ended in early October. So when the clip surfaced, fans did not treat it as a trivia miss. Pro Football Network reported viewer after viewer connecting the same dots, including one who wrote that it “now makes complete sense why they kicked this guy off of the Fox show” and another who called Fox’s decision the best thing it did, kicking what that fan called a casual off the pregame show. A network can survive hiring a provocateur. What it cannot survive is the audience concluding the provocateur never learned the product.
And today is literally the day
Timing is not everything in a donkey story, but it is close, and the timing here is merciless. This is not an admission Portnoy made in June about a game in some distant autumn. FOX Sports’ own how-to-watch guide has No. 6 Alabama visiting No. 14 Tennessee today, Saturday, October 17, at 3:30 p.m. ET from Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, with both teams 5–1. Today is the Third Saturday in October. The 109th edition of the fixture he had to have explained to him kicks off in front of a checkerboard end zone, with a cigar waiting in the winning locker room, on the exact date the rivalry is named after. Somewhere in Knoxville this afternoon there is a nine-year-old who can tell you what this game is called, when it started and why the winners smoke. The child did not need to text Mark Ingram. The child just lives there, the way generations have lived there since 1901.
So keep the proportions straight, the way this segment always tries to. Alabama fans did nothing wrong here, and neither did Tennessee fans; they supplied the history, the streaks, the cigars and the corrections, for free, within minutes. Mark Ingram did nothing wrong; he answered a text like a professional, which is more preparation than the question deserved. What happened here is narrower and, for a media operation, worse: a man was handed one of the most visible chairs in college football coverage, kept it for a little over a year, lost it weeks ago — and then demonstrated, on his own show, in rivalry week, that he had never learned one of the sport’s foundational fixtures. You do not have to know everything to talk sports on television. You do have to know the games that have names instead of dates.
The verdict
So the verdict goes where it belongs: not to the fans in either color who knew the answer before the question finished, and not to the former player who got the text. It goes to Dave Portnoy, who told on himself, and to the hiring logic that mistook a following for a foundation. A rivalry that started in 1901, got its name by 1939 and its cigars in 1961 does not need Dave Portnoy to know about it. It was here before the desk, it survived the desk, and it kicks off today without him. Text your sources before the show next time, Pres. The Third Saturday in October is not a trick question. It is the one with the date in the name.
THE VERDICT — After review: Dave Portnoy is outta pocket.
