Venue News: Sugar Bowl Officials Address Ticket Snafu; Raiders Look to New Stadium Opportunities

Sugar Bowl officials have had to deal with the fallout of a BCS championship ticket snafu that kept scores of angry fans out of Superdome seats for which they had paid hundreds of dollars. People who bought seats just below the press box arrived to find that the seats weren’t available: Sugar Bowl officials had turned the stadium’s top two rows into a press overflow area. Reporters were in one row, with the other row covered by a tabletop for laptops and equipment. According to Sugar Bowl spokesman John Sudsbury, someone forgot to block sales of those seats after officials realized that the smaller, post-renovation press box would not accommodate all the reporters covering the game. Monday’s game was apparently the first at the Superdome that required setting aside regular seating for an expanded press corps, but it will happen again when the venue hosts the Super Bowl next year…

…According to Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis, it is imperative that the team gets a new stadium. Davis has had discussions with groups in Los Angeles about returning the franchise to Southern California. With a general manager now in place to run the football side of the organization, Davis can focus even more on getting the Raiders out of the outdated Oakland Coliseum. The Raiders lack many of the modern amenities that are in some of the league’s newer stadiums that generate more revenues for other teams. Davis said CEO Amy Trask has talked with officials in Oakland about a new stadium there and with the 49ers about possibly sharing a stadium in Santa Clara, and that he has talked to groups in Los Angeles but hasn’t received an offer he likes…

…The Florida Atlantic University Owls opened the 2011 season in new 30,000-seat stadium on the school’s main Boca Raton campus. The facility, which can accommodate 65,000 additional seats and a roof if needed, features two Danley Sound Labs Jericho Horn JH-90. The JH-90 combines fifteen drivers into a single point-source enclosure for powerful but acoustically clean and simple sound.  The mounts meet strict safety standards while providing tilting capabilities in order to optimize coverage at the opposite end zone. The coverage patterns of the two Jericho Horn JH-90s blanket the entire bowl of the new stadium, save for a few seats directly below the scoreboard. Two flagship Danley SH-50 full-range loudspeakers were installed to provide the requisite fill. Ten Crown I-Tech 5000 HD amplifiers provide power to the system…

…Mitsubishi Electric Corporation will install two 1,011-inch Diamond Vision displays and 400-meter long ribbon boards, as well as several other signage devices, at Saitama Stadium 2002. The Diamond Vision displays, which will be the largest in any soccer stadium in Japan, and the ribbon boards will be launched sequentially from March 2013, and all displays will be fully operative by March 2014. The North and South Side stands each will be given a Diamond Vision display. Measuring 23 m x 10 m, they will be 20% larger than the current display, or almost as large as a full tennis court. Incorporating the highest quality LEDs aligned vertically and horizontally in an 8-mm dot pitch, the new screens are able to display full high-definition video content, yet will consume 35% less energy than the current display. Two ribbon boards will be installed along the main and back upper stands, each measuring169.6 m long and 0.8 m high.