Oregon is about to host one of its biggest games in program history this weekend when the second-ranked team in the country, Ohio State, walks into their building.
The winner of the game will position themselves well in the Big Ten standings and almost guarantee a spot in the conference title game, but will Oregon be cheating this weekend by pumping sound into the stadium?
Is Oregon Pumping Sound?
Pumping fake sound is now allowed in football, and teams try to make the place much louder so the opposing team has a hard team hearing anything.
During the Menace 2 Sports podcast with former Ohio State wide receiver coach Zach Smith, his co-host Kris Drew asked the question, “Does Oregon pump sound into their stadium?”
Drew didn’t bring this up out of the blue because he has been researching whether Oregon pumps sound and brought up some stats that could show they are cheating.
Drew mentioned that Neyland Stadium, home to the Tennessee Volunteers, has a capacity of over 100,000 and is one of the loudest stadiums in the sport. Still, Oregon’s stadium has a capacity of only 59,000, with standing room only, and its highest-ever recorded decibels are 127, which is higher than Neyland’s.
These alarming stats could prove that Oregon is pumping sound into its stadium, and this is an interesting topic that should be discussed more.
There is no question that the Ducks have a great fanbase, but something is making 59,000 fans louder than the 101,915 fans at Neyland Stadium.
In 2014, Tim Newcomb from Sports Illustrated published an article titled “Stadium Spotlight: What makes Oregon’s Autzen Stadium so loud?” Newcomb interviewed Christopher Mitchell of AECOM, one of the architects on the Autzen remodel, and stated.
“It is like a double-sided amphitheater,” he says. “All the energy is concentrated.”
With just one deck that flows freely, the seats and noise created from the wild Ducks fans doesn’t get broken up by structure and rings of glassed-in luxury seating. Add in a suite building on the north side with a flat, solid surface and a roof on the south side both bouncing sound back toward the field, and “all those things help concentrate sound back in toward the bowl,” Mitchell says.
Mitchell also talked about how the stadium was built around bedrock, and Newcomb wrote,
During original construction, Oregon took unused space north of the Willamette River connected to campus by a footbridge and, as Mitchell describes it, scraped up the earth around it to pour concrete on, forming the backbone of the seating bowl. With the 90-acre site full of bedrock, the locally sourced infill builds up around Autzen, encasing the state’s largest sports venue in earth and sinking the field, which also adds a noise-retaining benefit.
Drew’s and Sports Illustrated’s points are interesting, and both sides of the argument make great topics of conversation.
Oregon could be pumping sound, and that’s why the Stadium is so loud, or it could be because of how it was built, and the noise just stays in the stadium, but it’s a great topic to bring up days before they host one of the biggest games ever played there.
