BYU football: New scoreboard means no more stiff necks at BYU
A sunburn generally means a seat in the east bleachers, where the sun bakes until it finally falls behind the west stands. And a crick in the neck is a telltale sign of someone who had tickets in the south end zone and kept craning around to peek above and behind themselves at replays on the only video scoreboard in LaVell Edwards Stadium.
Those cricks become a pain of the past starting with No. 16 BYU's home-opener against Northern Iowa on Saturday, when the school will unveil a new video scoreboard above the stands in the north end zone.
The scoreboard has three screens. The main LED screen will show replays on a board that is 16 feet by 23 feet. The screen on the existing south scoreboard screen, in place since the early 1990s, is 23 feet by 30 feet.
"The new north board has better resolution than the south board," said Drew Allsup, the multimedia events coordinator who controls the board during games. "Now the people sitting under the video board on the south end can look north and see the same feed."
As part of the project, BYU replaced nearly all of the copper wiring in the stadium with fiber-optic cable.
The scoreboard upgrades were paid for in part through an exclusive sponsorship with Nu Skin Enterprises.
The sponsorship was negotiated for BYU by ISP Sports. The university outsourced much of its athletic marketing to ISP a few years ago. ISP is a national company that managed marketing for 55 college and university athletic programs, specializing in facility sponsorships, property revenue enhancement, signage and sales development.
The scoreboard model is an ISP product like one just added to the stadium at UNLV, said Peter Pilling, senior vice president and Mountain West/Big 12 Conference Relationship Manager.
The cost of the scoreboard has not been released, but BYU made the deal without taking on any debt. Nu Skin is the sponsorship partner, and ISP and the BYU athletic department provided some of the funds.
Some of the equipment arrived a week later than anticipated, so Allsup, the board operator, and his team are scrambling to prepare pictures of the BYU players and animations for the board for this week's game. That process will be much easier with a 21st century scoreboard.
"This board gives us a whole lot more flexibility," Allsup said.
The old system ran on old DOS computers, and Allsup spent about 40 minutes per player just to prepare a single photo for use on the scoreboard. The new board's system allows him to import a player's photo and clean it up with Windows XP in just minutes.
Recent comments
Isn't Nu Skin one of those pyramid scheme companies?
Curious in Logan.... | Sept. 3, 2008 at 2:19 a.m.
FYI The video board is a proprietary piece of software, it runs on…
Anonymous | Aug. 31, 2008 at 10:28 p.m.
re:hey yewts
Too bad the same fans that revel in the "Mitt Romney…
Olympic sized eweyts | Aug. 29, 2008 at 11:09 p.m.
