The Night is Dark & Full of Terrors…For the Opposition
Reser under the lights is a magical thing
An Ode to Pac-12 After Dark…
There have been many memorable games at Oregon State University over the years, but for some reason the ones that resonate with me years later happened at night, under the lights and stars. Quizz’s breakout performance against USC, the upset of No. 6 Arizona State in 2014, the chaos of the 4th quarter of the 2007 game vs. Washington , Darell Garretson’s one shining moment as a Beaver in 2016. I think I kissed the cute girl that lived in Finley Hall for the first time on the turf after a night game vs. Arizona in 1999, as “We’re going bowling!” flashed on the Reser Stadium scoreboard. Night games have always carried a bit more excitement for me. Big things happen under the brightest lights.
Yet for years, I’ve listened to people complain about 7:30 start times, as if Beaver Nation is made up of legions of youths with paper routes and farmers that need to be milking cows before the cock crows on Sunday morn. If someone is canceling their season tickets, you can bet when asked why “late start times” is top of the list for reasons why. I wonder if these people ever go to Vegas, or a Broadway show, or even a movie on a weekend.
The first thing we need to establish is that late starts do not effect attendance. Since the conference expanded to 12 teams in 2011, the average attendance at games starting at 5:00 pm or earlier is 37,990 fans. For games starting 6:00 pm or later, it’s 37,799 (according to Wikipedia), a difference of less than 200 fans. What’s more, if you remove games against Oregon (we haven’t hosted a Civil War night game since the expansion of the conference) the daytime attendance average drops to 37,278. The people that want to come to games come regardless of the time.
If you want to make the argument that attendance is hurt because people are dropping season tickets due to late starts, I guess that’s justifiable. But if people were giving up season tickets solely because of late start times, it still makes sense that they would buy single game tickets to day games, right? That doesn’t appear to be happening.
Night games also allow you to maximize your weekend. If you love college football, you’d want to be at a game during a time when you were missing fewer games of note around the country, right? Now you don’t have to miss that Alabama-Georgia game on CBS or a Michigan-Notre Dame game in the morning. If you need to mow your lawn, it’s hard to do that when you’ve got a game early in the afternoon in the fall. Grass is too wet to mow in the mornings and daylight’s gone before you’ll be home. If your kids play sports on the weekends, you aren’t going to miss their games. Or if, like me, your wife prefers to stay home, you don’t have to offload all parental duties to her for a full afternoon. In those instances, I found it harder to score on a Saturday night than Gary Andersen’s teams did.
You’ll also hear a lot from the Portland crowd that coming home late night is a pain. I agree, it’s a pain, but we’re talking a max of four Saturdays a year (in 2014, we played four games at 7:00 or later. No other year have we had more than three home night games). Furthermore, if this is the case, why are cheap seats readily available for a 5:00 pm game at Providence Park? Currently on Seat Geek tickets for the MSU game are half as expensive as the cheapest game at Reser. I get that it’s not USC or even Colorado, but it’s a chance to see the Beavs in your own back yard at a decent time for cheap.
The case could also be made that playing at 7:30 will provide maximum exposure for the Beavs going forward. If ESPN ends up with exclusive rights to Pac-12 football and nukes the Pac-12 network (likely), that probably means more games for OSU on ESPN/ESPN2 (next Saturday not included, ugh). That in itself provides more exposure. Case in point, the game vs. Boise State in Week One attracted 1.25 million viewers. OSU had just three games that garnered 1 million viewers from 2015-2021, and averaged less than 750K viewers per game in that same time span, in large part because of our banishment to the Pac-12 Network most weeks. The Boise State game amassed 1.25M viewers. Last year’s victory over USC (also on a September Saturday at 7:30pm) had 40% FEWER viewers, because it was on FS1. Playing on ESPN/2 matters, and rather than be shoved to ESPN+ or something while playing earlier in the day and having to compete with SEC games for airwaves, I would think OSU would much rather own the late night window on the Four-Letter network.
So if you want to roll your eyes and join the legions of grumps on Facebook that complain every time OSU posts the announced time of the next home game, be my guest. Real ones know that Reser really starts rockin’ after dark.
Quick Hits
The 1998 Civil War will always be my favorite win of my lifetime, and the Fiesta Bowl has to be #2, but the win Saturday against Fresno ranks right up there with the 1999 wins over Cal and Arizona, the 2000 wins over USC and Oregon, 2006 vs. UW, and 2008 vs. USC as one of my favorite wins of all time.
Jonathan Smith can never be criticized for going for it on 4th down again. He’s proven over the last 5 years that he’s right more than he’s wrong, and I think that faith in his team gives them confidence to succeed.
Jack Colletto, the Shohei Ohtani of college football, is your mom’s favorite player for sure. Definitely the most popular Beaver since the Rodgers brothers, and I think he probably has them beat. He may be in the running for the most popular Beaver of all time.
Men’s soccer is struggling to score goals, but they have dominated the run of play in most every game I’ve watched. Wins are coming for that squad. Stick with them.
