Confusion remains over fan “blackout” for NC State-Louisville game

The trend of not coordinating fans to wear a particular non-red color to NC State games continues, apparently. Similar to some fans not being, um, fans of the new alternate jerseys, there is a concern over bothering fans used to only wearing red to games.

I guess you can’t blame them, it’s been a tradition to wear red and white to the games since always. This is a classic push and pull of tradition vs something new and exciting. The “Black Howl” game against Lousville has been hyped since June, with the Wolfpack wearing special blacked out uniforms. The hope, I thought, was to have the fans do the same. There’s a whole theme here: the game is on a Thursday night, and it’s a full moon. I think it would have been cool to see an aerial shot of Carter-Finley and seeing a blackout.

However, there are now a lot of mixed messages being sent to the fans over what they should plan on doing. Officially, there is no plan to ask fans to wear a specific color. Questions to the official @PackFootball twitter account are being answered like this:

I'm sure there are a lot of internal machinations behind the scenes that we aren’t privy to. Not putting this on whomever runs this twitter account. That person probably wants it to:

The problem arises when NC State students are getting emails like this:

So now what are you supposed to think as a fan? This might just be a marketing thing to get you to buy merch, but still, it’s confusing.

Adding to that, there is a whole grassroots thing happening. Hashtag movements make me feel old, kind of like when someone says “for the gram”. Anyway, there’s this:

Now, before we go haywire, it’s possible coach Doeren may have briefly seen that. He probably just wanted to quickly show his support, then moved on with his day of watching game film of Lamar Jackson shred unsuspecting defenses. The problem is likely about not wanting to rock the boat with fans that are used to doing things the way we’ve always done them. You want everyone young and old to continue supporting the team, it’s understandable. And tradition is important, of course.

Penn State might have more tradition than just about any other school, with fans spanning multiple generations. They have been able to organize “whiteouts” for their night games. Seeing 100,000 people all in white on national TV gives the impression of strong fan unity, not to mention the affect on recruiting. To be fair, white is one of their standard colors, so that’s not an exact comparison. The point is that they were able to coordinate nearly twice as many attendees as NC State, so it’s not impossible. I say go for it.

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Thoughts? Who’s planning to wear black? Red? Nothing? Who lives a thousand miles away and has to watch on TV (raises hand)?