Guido D’Elia sat in Beaver Stadium staring at Penn State’s student section during the early portion of the 2004 season. With Joe Paterno’s team coming off a 3-9 campaign, the Nittany Lions’ then-director of communications and branding came to a realization that something needed to change inside the second-largest stadium in the country.
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“At that point, the crowds aren’t what they are like now,” said D’Elia, who is now known as a game-day doctor of sorts, focusing on enhancing the game-day atmosphere and branding for college programs. “They were fairly quiet. They were like opera crowds if you did something good. It was a down-in-front crowd except for the student section, which would get rowdy every once in a while, but it was kind of random without really understanding the game or what their power could be. We looked at the student section and said they’re just not having any fun and what is it?”
In any crowd, there’s bound to be people who stand out who are yelling more than the person next to them, ones who in this case were decked out in Penn State gear from head to toe while their classmate next to them was less into it. So D’Elia wondered aloud what would happen if the student section wore the same color. It could be their uniform, kind of like an army that all dresses alike. Plus, most people own white T-shirts, right?
“If you look around and see 20,000 people that are just like you, then you don’t stick out,” D’Elia said. “That was the theory, and it was really self-defense because we had to get something going.”
What D’Elia pondered during an otherwise lost season in which the Nittany Lions went 4-7 laid the foundation for what’s grown and evolved into one of the greatest spectacles in college football, the White Out. It’s evolved from the student section only to a full-Beaver Stadium tradition. Fifteen years after it started, the latest installment of the White Out arrives Saturday night when No. 7 Penn State (6-0, 3-0 Big Ten) hosts No. 16 Michigan (5-1, 3-1).
In the early days, it was as much about behind-the-scenes planning, thinking and hoping as it was a town, students and fans buying into the notion that fans screaming, jumping and cheering in unison while looking like a sea of white could make Beaver Stadium a place opponents dread.
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Now, even Penn State’s coaches have had to catch their breath as they stand in the tunnel, arm in arm with their players, and watch as the thousands of people wearing white and shaking white pom-poms let out screams that build to a roar, giving way to a rumble of sound that greets the home team as it runs onto the field and fireworks light up the night sky.
“I’ll have that eight seconds where I’m standing there in the tunnel and you see it and you hear it, but you literally feel it,” head coach James Franklin said. “You literally feel it.”
For those who’ve run onto the field, it’s a moment forever etched in their minds, win or lose. It’s a chance to shape the future of the program, too, as impressionable recruits pack into the bleachers experiencing an atmosphere that has become a widely recognized spectacle.
“My first experience with it, I came out of that tunnel and felt pretty normal until we got out there on that sideline and just kind of soaked it in,” said Penn State defensive coordinator Brent Pry. “Coach Franklin doesn’t like me to tell this story, but I about passed out. It was pretty awesome.”
The wall of sound didn’t happen overnight.
What’s grown to be the envy of many opponents and the hottest ticket of the season for the home team almost didn’t happen at all. In fact, the White Out was born with D’Elia and a marketing team that first tried to create an all-white-wearing and hostile student section that came before social media made disseminating information easy and instantaneous.
The White Out that Penn State fans now love needed to be built one year at a time, starting in those three weeks after D’Elia stared at the student section in 2004.
“At that point, I was driving the brand for football and it was not great for us. It was not a place that wowed recruits — in fact, it had an opposite effect,” D’Elia said. “We could talk about the stadium and its size, but as far as the atmosphere and having people behind you, they were seeing something else when they went other places. I complained, and finally (then-athletic director Tim) Curley said, ‘Shut up and fix it. It’s yours. I don’t want to hear anything else about it.’”
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So D’Elia decided they’d try to unite the student section, getting 20,000 people to wear white for the Oct. 9, 2004, game against Purdue. The key was that the participation couldn’t be 20 percent or even 50 percent of the student body. It would look weird if it was splotchy. If that happened, there was no way they were trying it again, D’Elia said.
This gave the marketing team three weeks to get the message out and to make a push to the students. About a dozen student marketing interns, their friends and other student fans would lead the charge, standing with bullhorns around campus during class changes, encouraging and reminding their classmates to wear white. Student interns would run through the HUB-Robeson Center during every lunchtime in those coming weeks, wearing white pants, white shoes and white face paint.
Students would pull up a chair at random tables in the dining halls the week of the Purdue game and tell their peers they were wearing white and ask them to help out by doing the same. They would hang flyers in the dorms, too, while D’Elia and the marketing department went downtown to College Avenue and persuaded store owners to change their storefronts to white and even dress their mannequins in the same color.
Students would stand outside the shops the day of the game, and if they saw their peers headed to the stadium in another color, they’d tell them through the bullhorn to go back and change to white. Even knocks on dorm-room doors the morning of the game — something that couldn’t happen on campus in 2019 — were a final reminder to wear white.
“It was crazy,” D’Elia said. “We didn’t know when to stop because we didn’t know how much we needed to do to get people convinced, so we did a little bit of everything. … We didn’t know what we were going to get. We had no idea. We were up on top of the press box looking at Curtin (Road) and it was like, oh my god. They are coming down and they are all in white. All in white. We didn’t give out a T-shirt. It was crazy. They just got behind it. … Then, when they showed up all in white they were an absolute menace.”
Coach Joe Tiller and the No. 9 Boilermakers, led by quarterback Kyle Orton, were treated to Beaver Stadium’s first student section White Out. Trying to audible to another play became a challenge as the students stayed loud and relentless, even when Penn State lost 20-13. At the very least, the students realized their cheering potential and Tiller left Happy Valley impressed by the noise created by the 108,183 fans in attendance.
“I thought the crowd, knowing how much audibilizing Orton has done at the line of scrimmage, (it was almost like) they’d been coached up,” Tiller said afterward, according to the Lafayette Journal & Courier. “They did a great job of making it difficult to communicate out there. Certainly the most challenging that we’ve seen by far.”
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Said D’Elia: “Once (students) saw their impact, it started to grow, even when they weren’t in white. They could see that they were a factor in people jumping offside and delay of game and just having to call a timeout because they couldn’t get the signals in. They started to realize they had an impact, and then it became all right, what do we do with this?”
Penn State followed it up with another successful student section White Out in 2005, this time with Michael Robinson, Derrick Williams and Paul Posluszny knocking off No. 6 Ohio State, 17-10, to spark a run to the Big Ten title. Tamba Hali secured the win by putting Troy Smith on his head, creating an iconic image that matched an atmosphere that was even more charged up.
The conventional approach would have been to quickly progress from the student section White Out to the entire stadium the following year. D’Elia said absolutely not. The students could have another White Out, but unlike the guerrilla marketing that worked with the students, getting information out to the rest of Beaver Stadium was considered much more challenging.
There were no dining halls to sit down in with season ticket holders, practically no way to connect with fans who drive in from all sides of the commonwealth for games and exit immediately afterward. Much like the first student White Out, if this thing failed, there was no going back to it.
“We’ll need everything we have to get 100,000 people to do the same thing,” D’Elia recalled. “We need a year. … We need a big opponent and we need warm weather. (In 2006), it was Michigan in mid-October and I said, eh, I just don’t think it’s gonna work for the first time. Maybe four, five years from now people will have white gear or feel good about layering up, but not now. I said no, and coaches, marketing people, everybody thought I was crazy.
“What I was holding out for was 2007 with Notre Dame rolling into town.”
Penn State’s all-out blitz for Jimmy Clausen, Charlie Weis and the Fighting Irish in September 2007 started in the offseason. Tickets would be printed in white, and season ticket holders would receive a flyer, explaining how the White Out would work. During the 2007 season opener, the students again took the lead with several volunteering to stand at every Beaver Stadium exit — starting in the third quarter to avoid missing anyone — holding signs that said, “Wear White Next Week.” The cowbells and bullhorns were back out as students would shout in any which direction about everyone needing to show up in white seven days later.
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Just in case that wasn’t enough, they’d plant students outside of the parking lot with large signs that were spaced 10 to 15 feet apart that read, “Wear… White… Next… Week… vs. Notre Dame.” These signs were planted everywhere fans could get out of Beaver Stadium. It was only announced in-stadium a handful of times, all of which came when the team was off the field, per Paterno’s request. He didn’t want Penn State looking past its Week 1 opponent, FIU, which it beat 59-0.
Penn State followed with a pep rally on campus the night before the Notre Dame game in which students would yell and cheer but Paterno would keep telling them to yell louder and louder. The next day, the full stadium White Out was born.
“It just took on a life of its own,” D’Elia said.
This week, Penn State’s marketing staff will not need to hold its breath about whether or not Nittany Lions fans will know to wear white on Saturday.
Those days are long gone and have since been enhanced by the fireworks and in-stadium distribution of white shakers that catch the light and help the sea of 110,000-plus pop as the cameras pan through the stadium. D’Elia, now semi-retired and working with a handful of other teams, will watch from afar as his brainchild and the army of white these students and fans built will be viewed by college football fans around the world. He insists it was everyone else who made it work.
“Everyone got behind it and now they own it. It’s theirs. It’s the fans, it’s the students,” D’Elia said. “It’s their deal. That’s their calling card, that’s what they’re known for, and they’re crazy loud and they’re nonstop, and the other thing that they are is it might be a White Out, but it’s very much blue-collar. They know what to do all the time, not just when their team is up.”
(Top photo: Randy Litzinger / Getty Images)