B1G 2020 || A B1G Score Board

It’s Day 2 of Purdue/Indiana Week for B1G 2020 and I’m already getting tired of writing about football. BoilerMan31 will have some more Purdue football articles on Wednesday and Thursday if you are into that. Today I’m writing for all you freaks out there that get hot and bothered when the discussion turns to giant video scoreboards.

Although odds are that no fans will get a chance to see it anytime soon, Purdue has built a giant video scoreboard at Ross-Ade Stadium. The propaganda arm of the Purdue Athletics department has the details here. It is 150’ 4” x 56’ 9”, which is a lot bigger than the old scoreboard and at least ten times bigger than the largest TV at the bw-3 on Teal Road. It will apparently be the first HDR (high-dynamic range) board in college football, so that is pretty cool.

Take a look y’all:

from Purdue ECN Engineering Webcam: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/WebCam/cam69

What are some giant video boards that you have seen? Which one is the best?

Here are a few highlights from my exciting life of interesting video boards:

• In 1997, I saw the U2 PopMart tour board at the Trans World Dome in St. Louis. They had a giant portable 150’ x 50’ screen behind the stage that was pretty darn impressive, especially considering that they had to tear it down and move it almost daily.
• In 1996, the old JumboTron at Ross-Ade Stadium. It was my brother’s freshman year at Purdue and he regaled us with tales of a football with arms and legs that did the Macarena and how awesome it was when they played C’Mon N’ Ride It (The Train) by the Quad City DJs. I visited for the Minnesota game and got to see the spectacle in person. My brother was not lying - the football doing the Macarena was pretty great.
• I went to a KC Royals game at some point sometime around 2010 and went on a stadium tour. The guide was really talking up the Royal Vision video board. It was the largest HD LED board ever when it was installed. It was pretty impressive, but the aspect ratio is kind of weird as it is taller than it is wide.
• In like 2016 or so, IPFW installed a couple of decent video boards at their basketball gym. The problem is that the gym isn’t very big and there really isn’t a good place to put them. So they put them on the wall kind of right next to the stands on either side. So to see them, you either have to look sideways away from the court at the wall, or look all the way across the court diagonally at the video board on the other side of wall. Not a great experience, but you’ve got to spend all of that sweet Summit League money on something.

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Yesterday I teased an exciting article coming up on Friday about the motion picture Somewhere in Indiana. I must admit that the trailer that I shared yesterday left a lot to be desired. It was honestly kind of boring, aside from a sensual pan across the body of a cool motorcycle that was shown for seemingly no reason at all.

Today we’ve got a second, better trailer to show you. But first, I must again implore you to watch the full movie at dailymotion, the world’s best and most popular video site. In case you are still on the fence about watching this, in this movie there are “Four different people, embarking on a journey, looking for answers.”

• Adam - lost his job in early January and things were very tense at home between Rita and him.
• Sam - who was trying to find himself.
• Dan - still grieving over the death of his young bride Tabitha.
• Jane - someone who pushed, prodded, and convinced all of them to go to Indiana on that hot August weekend.

Now that I have you on the edge of your seat, here is the second trailer:

I have started a petition to get Purdue to show Somewhere in Indiana on the new video board. It is not an online petition; those are too easy. I am going door-to-door across the entire state of Indiana and so far I have six signatures. If you live in Indiana, expect to see me soon wearing a Jason mask and holding a clipboard.

If nothing else good happens in 2020 other than Don Boner’s love letter to Fake James Dean being shown on a giant screen, then I think we can say that it was a good year overall.