Hey Big Ten football fans, do you want 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. kickoffs, or noon and 3:30?

I vote for noon and 3:30 p.m., and so, apparently, does Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany.

So wrote Don Doxsie of the Quad City Times the other day. If it's true, go for it, Commish. The Hlog approves.

That won't make me any friends in my sportswriting community, which gets smaller with each passing year. The earlier the game, the more time to write. And the earlier the game ends and the sooner you get done writing, the sooner you can hit the highway to head back to your home city.

But I've always thought the 11 a.m. games, which the Big Ten has now had for a long time, are ridiculous.

Some people travel a few hours to go to the games. Not everyone has the time or money to arrive the night before. And besides, no great sporting event starts before noon. Sure, major golf tournaments have tee times before noon, but the contenders on the weekend don't. The early NFL games start at noon, Central time, on Sundays. That works.

Not everyone would love the 3:30 games, and I wouldn't like them as much as 2:30 starts. Something about the 2:30 kickoffs just feels right to me after all these years.

But look at it this way: If your team is good enough to be playing in that 3:30 time slot, it gets to finish in prime-time and be seen by an even larger audience. If that sort of thing matters to you.

The games I dislike covering are the 7 p.m. starts. They're great for atmosphere, but they're hellish for newspaper deadlines. We had a night game at Penn State in 2009, and with all the stuff we put on the Gazette Web site afterward and then the drive we had back to our motel in Altoona, 45 miles from State College, it was 3-something in the morning when we got back to our rooms. Then we left at 6 a.m. or something like that to drive to Pittsburgh to catch a flight. I don't even want to think about that anymore.

Oh yeah, Iowa plays at Penn State again this year. It's the Big Ten-opener for the Hawkeyes. But Ohio State is at Nebraska the same day, so I peg that game for 7 p.m. Whew.

So anyhow, what do you prefer? 11 and 2:30 or 12 and 3:30? And why?