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My trip to OU and why CU the athletic dept should listen

bbads

Member
I traveld to oklahoma this past weekend. Some say its a waste of the 1450 milies i put on my car for the round trip from boulder to norman.
non the less i had a ball and came away with these observations. and why CU should follow suit.

Video board- The size of this thing in norman is insane. its in HD and obviously expensive. when we have the money, lets please update our scoreboard and video boards please.....

Presentation: here is the big one. Prior to going into the locker room the players all meet in the middle of the field and get amped while crazy train is playing, they go into the locker room. after the band does there thing it follows with player introductions on the 40 yard video board. sunday night football style. the player introduce themselves on the board and the crowd gets rowdy.(other schools do this too, alabama is one) then a video comes up of the players exiting the locker room all syked and pumped up and follows them to the sooner schooner bubble where they are all jumping up and down and follow there little wagon out to the field and hit a sign. then the boomer sooner chants start from each side of the stadium.

it was the coolest, and best way ive seen to get both the fans, and the players amped.

The kicker is as all this is happening the recruits are on the sidelines watching. if im a kid, i couldnt help but imagine myself on that huge board saying my name and postion and the crowd cheering after it and being apart of that type of presentation, non the less a program of that stature, no matter how crappy norman is.

CU has the ingredients to do all of this. Think of the games at folsom, obviously ralphie is the best thing ever, but we dont exploit it enough. fans were more pumped to see a wagon in oklahoma than a buffaloe in boulder. (dont say its because we are a worse team) were in boulder, an awesome top 5 place to live! lets use what we have to recruit and get people amped.



lets get creative, lets get with the times, lets recruit, and lets win some football games!
 
Great post.

Since (allegedly) no one at the AD reads message boards (cough, cough), maybe you should re-draft that into an email to Bohn? This type of stuff is what he's good at. And I know that new video boards / gameday experience at Folsom is his top facility priority right now.

(And some rep to you for making that trip and finding a way to enjoy it.)
 
Great Post bbads i agree with all of this. One thing i would add is that we also need a better sound system you couldn't get pumped up to crazy train or whatever we want when you cant even tell what song is playing out of those crappy fuzzy ass speakers. we need to get some great speakers with huge subs and play Bring em out like the bball team and crank up the BASS. the Players will go crazy and the fans will follow suit
 
Their fans show up before kickoff. Our student section shows up late as hell to our games. Need to fix that first.
 
They also sing the last line of the national anthem as "... and the home, of the SOONERS!"

They do some fun stuff, but some redneck, too.
 
They also sing the last line of the national anthem as "... and the home, of the SOONERS!"

They do some fun stuff, but some redneck, too.

do they announce the guys on death row that say "Boomer Soonner" as they are put to eternal sleep? :smile2:
 
Their fans show up before kickoff. Our student section shows up late as hell to our games. Need to fix that first.

Part of this could be fixed with far better entrance management, make it easier for students to get in and out. While your at it doing a better job of keeping them separated from the normal fanbase might help with some of our perceptions issues as well.
 
Their fans show up before kickoff. Our student section shows up late as hell to our games. Need to fix that first.

Give the students a jacked up intro like this and I bet the early show rate would skyrocket. Well, that and a team that has an actual chance to win and even blow out teams.
 
The video board is a big deal.
Kansas installed a new one this season.
Nebraska has many huskervisions.
UT's Godzillatron is out of this world.
TT and OSU have more modern video walls.
There are better video systems at SMU and West Virgina.
The only stadium I've seen with a video board on par with CU is Cal. And Cal has budgeted theirs to be replaced as part of the stadium renovation.

While everyone else on the block has HD, CU has got the equivalent of one of these


0.jpg
 
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Texas Godzillatron
scoreboard.jpg


OU Scoreboard
OKLAh.jpg_2D00_550x0.jpg


Kansas new video board
4480574810_18ac994eb1_z.jpg



Nebraska scoreboard
Husker-Vision800x600.jpg
 
I traveld to oklahoma this past weekend. Some say its a waste of the 1450 milies i put on my car for the round trip from boulder to norman.
non the less i had a ball and came away with these observations. and why CU should follow suit.

Video board- The size of this thing in norman is insane. its in HD and obviously expensive. when we have the money, lets please update our scoreboard and video boards please.....

Presentation: here is the big one. Prior to going into the locker room the players all meet in the middle of the field and get amped while crazy train is playing, they go into the locker room. after the band does there thing it follows with player introductions on the 40 yard video board. sunday night football style. the player introduce themselves on the board and the crowd gets rowdy.(other schools do this too, alabama is one) then a video comes up of the players exiting the locker room all syked and pumped up and follows them to the sooner schooner bubble where they are all jumping up and down and follow there little wagon out to the field and hit a sign. then the boomer sooner chants start from each side of the stadium.

it was the coolest, and best way ive seen to get both the fans, and the players amped.

The kicker is as all this is happening the recruits are on the sidelines watching. if im a kid, i couldnt help but imagine myself on that huge board saying my name and postion and the crowd cheering after it and being apart of that type of presentation, non the less a program of that stature, no matter how crappy norman is.

CU has the ingredients to do all of this. Think of the games at folsom, obviously ralphie is the best thing ever, but we dont exploit it enough. fans were more pumped to see a wagon in oklahoma than a buffaloe in boulder. (dont say its because we are a worse team) were in boulder, an awesome top 5 place to live! lets use what we have to recruit and get people amped.



lets get creative, lets get with the times, lets recruit, and lets win some football games!
Wow! I would think the exact opposite. CU has a fantastic game experience. I would not change anything. The stadium, the mountain backdrop, everythign is great. A video board is horrible idea in my opinion. The beauty of college football is that it's authentic. CU is still pure in that sense. Don't change!!! I hate pumped in music. I love the bands, cheerleaders, ralphie, etc. All of that other crap is so contrived. I hate it. For the record, most people at UT games hate our massive jumbotron. Takes away from the experience. The crowd will get loud when you win. Is there anything more lame than having a jumbotron piping in artifical excitement when you're losing and your team sucks? That's the case now at UT this season. Leave the showtime crap for the nba.
 
Wow! I would think the exact opposite. CU has a fantastic game experience. I would not change anything. The stadium, the mountain backdrop, everythign is great. A video board is horrible idea in my opinion. The beauty of college football is that it's authentic. CU is still pure in that sense. Don't change!!! I hate pumped in music. I love the bands, cheerleaders, ralphie, etc. All of that other crap is so contrived. I hate it. For the record, most people at UT games hate our massive jumbotron. Takes away from the experience. The crowd will get loud when you win. Is there anything more lame than having a jumbotron piping in artifical excitement when you're losing and your team sucks? That's the case now at UT this season. Leave the showtime crap for the nba.

True to form, Texas over did it. The quality of the screen is amazing, but it's distracting.

I don't think CU should get bigger video boards. Just HD.

Folsom is like the Carnegie hall of football stadiums. It's an historic classic. There are bigger venues with fancier media equipment.

But CU has an awesome climate, a great college setting, and the narrow sidelines with the sloped Colorado horseshoe is intimate.
 
True to form, Texas over did it. The quality of the screen is amazing, but it's distracting.

I don't think CU should get bigger video boards. Just HD.

Folsom is like the Carnegie hall of football stadiums. It's an historic classic. There are bigger venues with fancier media equipment.

But CU has an awesome climate, a great college setting, and the narrow sidelines with the sloped Colorado horseshoe is intimate.
I agree 100%.
 
I've been to a number of statiums and CU is by far the best experience. Every element is nearly perfect. It's the way college football "should be", in my opinion. Not to say that the over the top stadiums don't have their places, in certain places, but FF is dead-on perfect for CU.

You can't get crowds and teams excited when you're losing. Only winning will do that. That's the missing factor at CU now, but you can't create that artifically. It has to be organic.
 
I think there are certain enhancements that should be made to Folsom. The entry thing is a disaster. They need to do a much better job of that, especially if they're going to try to increase capacity. I think they could, and should have better jumbotrons at each side of the stadium. They can double the size of each of these scoreboards without detracting from the overall ambience of the stadium.

BTW - Princeton has a better scoreboard than CU. I saw that thing and I was like "wow, that's incredibly cool".
 
I think there are certain enhancements that should be made to Folsom. The entry thing is a disaster. They need to do a much better job of that, especially if they're going to try to increase capacity. I think they could, and should have better jumbotrons at each side of the stadium. They can double the size of each of these scoreboards without detracting from the overall ambience of the stadium.

BTW - Princeton has a better scoreboard than CU. I saw that thing and I was like "wow, that's incredibly cool".
I think Princeton has an endowment of $12 billion. Not that they use that for athletics, I have no idea, but they have loads of money.
 
Texas Godzillatron
scoreboard.jpg


OU Scoreboard
OKLAh.jpg_2D00_550x0.jpg


Kansas new video board
4480574810_18ac994eb1_z.jpg



Nebraska scoreboard
Husker-Vision800x600.jpg

We're putting up another one and adding 6k in seats.

In all honesty that **** doesn't make atmosphere...it all starts with the guy in the AD chair and the man with the headset on.
 
This type of stuff is what he's good at.

Yep. Not so much coaching hires, coach contracts, CSU game negotiations or letting coaches go in an appropriate manner. But he is good at that part, I'll give you that.
 
We're putting up another one and adding 6k in seats.

In all honesty that **** doesn't make atmosphere...it all starts with the guy in the AD chair and the man with the headset on.

No argument about where it starts.

It's not the scoreboard so much as what's on the scoreboard.

That said, wanna trade? kNU has six big huskervision screens? How about sending one to Boulder.

I was at the TCU-SMU game and felt a pang of embarrassment when realizing SMU has a better video board than CU. CU doesn't even have a Conf USA quality set-up.
 
I'm glad that we dont have a big video board, and that our speakers suck. I go to a bunch of the Texas games here in Austin and every timeout, commercial break, etc is just a loud blaring advertisement. It's like watching the game on TV, with no remote or mute button. Instead of the band playing and guys doing flips and cheerleaders dancing its just one giant commercial for 3 hours between plays.
 
I didnt think there was anything wrong with the replay boards when I was at CU from 2003-2007...unless there's been any kind of significant degradation in picture quality since then, I wouldn't consider an upgrade to be an urgent priority...I'm more happy that the CEC finally got video boards (a much needed improvement)
 
I didnt think there was anything wrong with the replay boards when I was at CU from 2003-2007...unless there's been any kind of significant degradation in picture quality since then, I wouldn't consider an upgrade to be an urgent priority...I'm more happy that the CEC finally got video boards (a much needed improvement)

Dude, CU's video boards are horribly outdated. Arkansas, at its track and field stadium, even has a video board that blows out what CU has at Folsom. That's not even mentioning the football stadium. CU doesn't need to go gigantic, but they definitely need an upgrade.
 
I still remember going to football games and there not being any replay. Kinda like going to the CEC.
 
I didnt think there was anything wrong with the replay boards when I was at CU from 2003-2007...unless there's been any kind of significant degradation in picture quality since then, I wouldn't consider an upgrade to be an urgent priority...I'm more happy that the CEC finally got video boards (a much needed improvement)

The cute antique video boards that CU have aren't a big deal if you don't watch games at other stadiums. But as soon as I find myself in an other stadium with better video boards, there is envy. I suspect when one of our Buff players walk off the field in Norman or Lincoln or Austin that they also look at those video boards and wonder why CU is so cheap.

Good video boards are not only for the fans, but also the recruits.

When you take a recruit to the fifty yard line and ask him, "can you imagine seeing yourself play football and have your image broadcast to a stadium full of Buff fans?" The recruit is going to remember being asked the same question and having a much clearer picture etched in his mind.
 
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Fans might not all appreciate giant HD video boards, but recruits do. Fans get excited about winning, to win we need to recruit better athletes, top recruits want to see themselves 10 feet tall on instant replay, so it improves the game experience indirectly by allowing CU to better market itself to 17-18 year old kids. Fans also love to hate Oregon's ridiculous uniforms, but 18-22 year olds love them and it helps recruiting - they're #1 right now. Obviously it's more than unis and scoreboards, but we need to be able to market ourselves to young kids - not just fans. Fans will forgive ugly uniforms and over the top presentation if the team is winning - doesn't work the other way around.
 
The cute antique video boards that CU have aren't a big deal if you don't watch games at other stadiums. But as soon as I find myself in an other stadium with better video boards, there is envy.

I do watch games at other stadiums routinely - I'm a grad student at UF so I've been to a bunch of games at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, which has a video board that is somewhere in size between the Oklahoma and Texas examples - does it make me envious or anything like that compared to what we have at Folsom? Not especially. The main issue that I do have with the video boards at Folsom is that they do not do a good job of displaying both stats and out-of-town scores - I'd love to see improvement on that front...


Good video boards are not only for the fans, but also the recruits.

When you take a recruit to the fifty yard line and ask him, "can you imagine seeing yourself play football and have your image broadcast to a stadium full of Buff fans?" The recruit is going to remember being asked the same question and having a much clearer picture etched in his mind.

Fair point but I do wonder how much influence that would actually have on a recruit's decision - I would think the majority of recruits are mainly concerned with issues such as compatibility with coaches and playing time....
 
look CU is trying to sell an experience to the fans and right now there is more value at other schools in terms of what is on the field and the whole stadium experience.
 
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