SMU brought its full marching band to Happy Valley for Saturday’s College Football Playoff game against Penn State. However, the Mustang Band might as well have stayed home in Dallas anyway.
The Nittany Lions made their visitors completely irrelevant by sticking them in the nosebleeds.
This is not a new phenomenon in college football. Teams often banish the opposing band to the worst possible seats to further increase their home-field advantage. The further it is away from the field, the less it can be heard. Obviously.
Penn State purposely places its visiting band in the north corner of Beaver Stadium waaaayyyyyy above the end zone. That is true during the regular season and apparently applies to the postseason as well.
In this specific instance, SMU was barely visible.
Beaver Stadium holds a maximum capacity of 106,000. Opposing schools for on-campus College Football Playoff games were allotted 3,500 tickets— total. That number includes members of the band.
The Mustang Marching Band is already very small to begin with. Where most Big Ten bands have as many as 300 members, the newly-minted ACC band has only 111. You had to squint to see them.
Yes that’s the SMU band tucked into that upper deck corner. Not sure I’ll hear the fight song over here… pic.twitter.com/BQi2PzsTlM
— Tim Cowlishaw (@TimCowlishaw) December 21, 2024
Here is another video for perspective:
SMU’s band appears to be having a great time up there pic.twitter.com/tPqpN2UcTY
— Joel Haas (@Joel_Haas1) December 21, 2024
Not only did the nosebleed seating assignment completely eliminate the band’s impact on the game, it made for a brutal trek for its performance at halftime. SMU had to head down to the field with more than seven minutes left in the second quarter. It did not return back to the northeast corner of the uppermost deck until the last possible second before kickoff in the third quarter.
Even though the Mustang Marching Band was unable to will its team to victory from outer space and were left to freeze in the nosebleeds, it got to play at the College Football Playoff. That is an experience those college students will never forget, even in defeat.