Jack McCluskey 10y

BC installing 'showcase' video boards

Beginning this fall, replays in Alumni Stadium will come to fans all the way from Brookings, South Dakota.

No, the control room hasn’t been outsourced almost 1,600 miles to middle America. The new video boards the Eagles are installing this summer are being manufactured there, at the headquarters of electronic display board company Daktronics, and then trucked to BC in sections.

The old video boards, which anyone in Alumni could see were clearly outdated, have been taken down and work is underway on steel supports and electrical wiring for the new boards.

When the project is finished in early August, BC will have new end-zone boards and new ribbon boards along the stadium fascia in the end zones and along the sidelines. At 19.2 feet by 54 feet, each end-zone board boasts 1,036 square feet of video space, the pictures that will fill them created by 258,000 pixels and 855,000 LEDs.

“Boston College will be a showcase venue for us, the first of its kind in the Northeast,” said Dave D’Amico, northeast regional sales director for Daktronics.

The school tweeted a rendering of what the new end-zone setup will look like:

BC athletic director Brad Bates explained the reasoning behind the upgrade -- which also includes replacing speakers throughout the stadium -- in a blog post on the school’s website.

“The new boards symbolically and literally represent our commitment to beating the living room experience,” he wrote.

The boards are 13 HD LED, which means there is just 13 millimeters of space between pixels -- allowing for tight video resolution. So tight, D’Amico says, that BC’s new boards will one-up those the Patriots boast in Gillette (which are 15 mm).

Which begs the question: Who has the best (video) game in town?

Jack McCluskey is an editor for ESPN.com and a frequent contributor to ESPNBoston.com. Follow him on Twitter @jack_mccluskey.

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