Most references to “Friday Night Lights” are to the best-selling book on Texas high school football, the ensuing film or the TV show derived from both that lives on in reruns.
This year, in a departure from tradition, the term also applies to a marketing campaign for Ivy League football. The league and the cable network NBCSN are in the middle of a six-game package that, by the time it concludes with the Yale-Harvard game on Nov. 21, will have included five Friday night games and featured all eight conference teams.
That is a significant departure for a league in which early Saturday afternoon kickoffs were as traditional as the ivy that covered the brick walls of campus buildings and tailgating typically began and ended in daylight. But the Ivy League’s teams, and their fans, have embraced night football: Harvard’s attendance is about 25 percent higher when it plays at night, and Pennsylvania’s game against Yale last week produced its biggest crowd of the season.
“Saturday midday is just tough for people because of family obligations,” said Eric Allen, a former Brown defensive back who is now a member of the Brown Football Association’s executive committee. The Bears, like other league teams, regularly draw bigger crowds at night, but they must install temporary lights for such games because they are one of the two Ivy teams whose stadiums do not have them.
Four of this season’s night games on NBCSN were scheduled for the final five weeks of the Ivy schedule, beginning with the Yale-Penn game in Philadelphia, the first nationally televised night game in the history of 120-year-old Franklin Field.
Ivy League teams have hosted night games since the 1970s, and Harvard hosted its first in 2007, the year lights were installed at Harvard Stadium. This year, though, seeking greater exposure for both its football programs and its universities, the Ivy League agreed to play five games on Friday nights, and even moved the traditional noon kickoff of the Yale-Harvard game to 2:30 p.m., which will require the installation of temporary lights at the Yale Bowl.
The night games are part of a wider television strategy. Over all, three cable networks will broadcast 17 Ivy games this season, the most ever. NBCSN, which reaches 82 million homes in the United States, is in its eighth year of carrying Ivy football.
“As an international as well as a national brand, having a national television package is important to us,” said Robin Harris, the executive director of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents. “We saw this as an opportunity to expose our model of athletics and academics across the country.”
Given the glut of college football games broadcast on Saturdays, from late morning until deep into the night on the West Coast, NBCSN and the Ivy League saw a mutually beneficial window for exposure on Friday night, when there are fewer football offerings on television.
Playing on Friday, though, generally requires the road team to miss Friday classes. That was why, in devising the schedule, the Ivy League ensured that no team was scheduled to be the visitor for more than one Friday night game. And no team was asked to host more than one night game.
“We’re very sensitive to missed class time, so we tried to minimize the travel for the visiting teams,” Harris said. “We look out for each other.”
Friday night games also offer opportunities to deliver a different game-day experience. For last week’s game against Yale, Penn’s athletic department sponsored a fan fest, with music provided by the campus radio station, giveaways and local restaurants selling food on a closed street a few blocks from Franklin Field.
“We wanted to create a block party atmosphere,” said Penn’s senior associate athletic director for external affairs, Roger Reina. “The important thing with a night game is to schedule festivities around it.”
The Quakers’ 34-20 victory attracted 5,849 fans, Penn’s largest crowd of the year.
“By any measure, it was a great success,” Reina said. “We’re looking forward to more games like this.”
When Harvard visits Yale in two weeks for the 132nd edition of The Game, it will be the first time the venerable Yale Bowl, opened in 1914, is illuminated for an athletic contest.
“Since before the season started, this has been the most talked about Harvard game because of that,” said Steve Conn, Yale’s associate athletic director for sports publicity. “We’re expecting the most spirited crowd in the history of Yale-Harvard.”
Harvard has played 12 home night games since 2007, more than any other Ivy team. The average attendance for those games was 15,354. Over the same span, excluding Yale games, Harvard has averaged 11,622 on Saturday afternoons.
Despite its stadium’s lacking lights, Brown has hosted seven night games since 2010, all on Saturdays. Those games have averaged 10,672 fans, including an average of 14,906 for three games against Harvard. When the Crimson visited Brown Stadium in 2014, a postgame fireworks display helped increase attendance.
“We were looking for ways to bring more excitement to home games,” Allen said. “The students have enjoyed it, and we get more local people to the games. It also works well for our alums.”
Such successes suggest a future for Ivy night games, as well as more later starting times on Saturdays to accommodate television. Harris, though, said the league would evaluate all aspects of its partnership with NBCSN after the season, “particularly the experience of our student-athletes,” before committing to a schedule for 2016.
“We know who we are and what our principles are,” she said, “and we’re not going to sacrifice them for television or any other commercial aspects.”
