Capturion is building the largest high definition light emitting diode screen in the Southeastern Conference at Davis Wade Stadium.
Project manager Steve White said the entire structure will be about 94 feet tall.
“The main LED board is 112 feet long and 48 feet tall,” White said. “It’s the fourth largest in the United States.”
He also said there will be screens on columns on each side of the main screen.
“Those screens are 14 feet wide by 40 feet long,” he said. “Those will be the advertisement LED panels.”
White said the new scoreboard should be finished by the end of October.
Mike Nemeth, Senior associate athletic director for media relations and corporate development, said a new score board was needed because the old one is outdated.
“Technology-wise, we can’t replace certain parts of that board,” he said. “They just don’t make them.”
Nemeth said constructing the board on the South end leaves room for possible seating changes.
“I think that we wanted to keep that option open just to have the option of adding some different type of seating in that end zone,” he said.
MSU athletic director Gregory Byrne said the athletic department is continuing work on the master plan for the stadium.
“We are sold out on all of our sky boxes, club seats and all of our high-end Bulldog club seats,” he said. “Our fans are willing to support and donate amenities, and we need to create more of that inventory, and to do that we need more of that flexibility,”
Byrne said the old scoreboard on the North end will stay in use at least for this semester.
“What we do with it for the long term, we still haven’t decided,” he said. “We’ll either continue to use it or we’ll take it down.”
Nemeth said the new scoreboard will cost $6.1 million.
“Like many of the other facilities and construction projects we have going on here, no money is being used to construct the board,” Nemeth said. ” It’s being totally paid for by Bulldog Club funding.”
He also said the new board will bring new opportunities for advertising and sponsorship.
White said part of B. S. Hood Road will remain closed until the construction is finished.
“We’ll have heavy equipment going in and out all throughout the process,” he said. “As long as we have heavy equipment going in there and turning around, we’re going to keep the road closed.”
Byrne said the HD LED screen at Davis Wade Stadium will not be Capturion’s last project at MSU.
“We’re going to put up a new board for our soccer team,” he said. “We are [also] going to make some improvements to the video portion of our baseball board.”
“Next year depending on how this goes and depending on how MSU likes us, we’re going to put full length LED ribbons around both sides of the stadium,” he said.
Senior foreign language major Michael Rutherford is looking forward to the new screen.
Rutherford said the screen will help bring recognition to the university.
“We may not do that well in football, but we can say, ‘Hey, we have this,’ kind of like for how all those years we had the best field,” he said.