[Quack Attack]

Big news in Eugene, but don't tell anyone


Tuesday, July 22, 2008 RYAN WHITE
The Oregonian Staff



A new $2 million-and-change video board is going up in Autzen Stadium. It will be 88 feet wide and 33 feet high, which makes it bigger than the board Oregon State installed at Reser Stadium before last season. And Oregon State's board was the biggest in the Pacific-10 Conference.
So the Ducks are going to have a shiny, new $2 million-and-change, wide-screen video board that's the biggest in the conference, and the news broke on a blog.

It's a good blog, but it's a blog. Rob Moseley, who covers the Ducks for the Register-Guard in Eugene, writes it, and he got some e-mails that something was going on at Autzen, went to the stadium, snapped a picture and put it on his blog.

At which point, I called a bunch of people in Oregon's athletic department and left messages. The message: What's going on with the scoreboard? The implied question: Everything OK?

It's a bit of a sport these days to have fun with Oregon's extravagances, like when they put a waterfall in the training room. Unnecessary? Yes, but good fun in a look-at-me-I'm-so-rich-I-can-afford-a-waterfall kind of way.
If you could count on the Ducks for anything, it was that they would spend money, and do it proudly. The Ducks advertised the training facility on YouTube with an MTV-style video.

They once had weekly television time to replay games -- in New York, where they'd plastered promotional billboard after promotional billboard.
But they didn't even have a news release ready for a new, biggest-in-the-conference video screen. Jim Bartko, UO's senior associate athletic director in charge of cool new stuff, called back and then had to get the specs on the board and call back again.

"It was kind of a last-second decision," Bartko said.
The $67-million media-rights deal Oregon agreed to with IMG in February included $4 million for new video boards, Bartko said. That money is being split among Autzen and the as-yet-to-be-constructed baseball stadium and basketball arena.
The current scoreboard was added to the stadium in 1998, which Bartko said put it near the end of its life. Scoreboard years are longer than dog years, it seems. It was going to be replaced either this year or next, according to Bartko. It ended up being this year.

The new one won't be high-definition, but it'll be nice and bright when it debuts Aug. 30, when the Ducks kick off the season against Washington -- a night game, no less. Which is why it makes no sense at all that Oregon didn't promote the heck out of this thing. Over speakerphone, an Oregon spokesman said they are focusing on the announcement of the billboards in Beijing. "Are you doing that?" I said. "You're that gullible?" he said.
Yeah, but come on, if Oregon put a billboard in Beijing, would you be surprised?

Ducks are spending over 2 million dollars on a scoreboard and it is not going to have High Definition quality?