STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Parker Washington spun out of one Ohio State tackle, and as the Penn State receiver darted down the sideline, the shouts started from inside the Beaver Stadium press box.
As Washington approached the 20-yard line, Guido D’Elia knew the stadium was about to erupt with one directive. Everyone saw Washington’s clear path to the end zone. Before Penn State fans lost their minds, D’Elia hit them with the song that’s long been the Nittany Lions’ big-play anthem.
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“Zombie, now!” yelled D’Elia, referring to Zombie Nation’s song “Kernkraft 400.” The electronic rumblings from the song’s first few bars were pulsing through the stadium by the time Washington hit the 10-yard line. The moment he scored, the crowd already knew what to do as the song synced up with the home crowd’s cheers of “Oh oh oh oh oh, ohhhh … We Are Penn State.”
D’Elia recalls the moment like an offensive coordinator who called the right play to blister an opposing defense. When he watched this game back with Penn State’s game day staff — an exercise they do to see if they hit on the right music at the right moments, delicately toying with the crowd while also knowing they need to be scripted but not too scripted — they knew they got this one right.
“When you see him going down the sideline free and the crowd is going ‘Ohhhh,’ then you hit Zombie Nation at that point before they exhale — not after he crosses the goal line,” D’Elia said. “We hit that at the 20-yard line. This is when they’re exhaling and you join them. You need to listen to them. It’s a conditional game call. It’s based on them, not you, or a script that you made on Tuesday.”
D’Elia is a specialist at this sort of thing. He was once Joe Paterno’s right-hand man whose marketing chops shined as he morphed into a game day doctor of sorts. As the architect of Penn State’s White Out, D’Elia has traversed the country consulting with other schools who wanted to pick his brain about how they could enhance their in-stadium atmosphere.
Paterno lent him to Greg Schiano and Rutgers around 2007, with the longtime Penn State coach extending his left hand and telling D’Elia “get out there and help Greg.” D’Elia has continued to prep Schiano for media availabilities while also working behind the scenes to help enhance Rutgers’ game day atmosphere.
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The cozy confines of home and the rising costs associated with attending games in some of the more remote college locations — plus not knowing start times until a week or two before — make someone like D’Elia an invaluable resource. Getting fans in the stadium to give them something they can’t experience at home on the couch is what keeps D’Elia thinking.
It’s also why he answered the phone a couple of months ago when new Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft reached out. D’Elia hadn’t worked for Penn State since February 2012. At the time, the brand he helped bolster had become tarnished as part of the fallout from the Jerry Sandusky scandal. D’Elia, a native of Altoona, Pa., kept an eye on the program and the White Out from afar. He worked with Rutgers and consulted for other programs, even going to Alabama and offering some suggestions.
“It’s like Warren Buffet saying take a look at my portfolio,” D’Elia quipped. “But there are little tweaks you can do and little things you can find.”
Penn State is now looking for D’Elia to make some of those changes back in Happy Valley.
“Guido is kind of a legend in our world,” Kraft said. “You look at what he’s done to create game day experiences everywhere. I’m evaluating everything and looking at how we do things. Everything we can do we can get better at. Even though we have a famous game day experience, we always have to look at how we elevate ourselves.
“I had admired him for so long. So, if you’re going to be at Penn State, why would you not go talk to the brain behind so many things here, you know, from the game day experience to the marketing side?”
After several weekly phone calls, the athletic director had a proposition: Would D’Elia be up for coming back to Beaver Stadium this season and giving his unfiltered look at Penn State’s game day production?
More than a decade had passed since D’Elia’s departure, and the past year has featured more changes with Penn State hiring Kraft and new university president Neeli Bendapudi. Yes, this move was about enhancing Beaver Stadium’s atmosphere, but it also was about a new regime trying to better understand Penn State and its complicated past. D’Elia, in a move that would not have happened if he wasn’t wowed by Kraft, accepted the offer. Last month, he started working as an adviser to the athletic department.
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There’s a delicate balance to strike between Penn State’s past under Paterno and its present and future. D’Elia is a link to the past, and Kraft hasn’t shied away from Penn State’s history. Fans noticed this at the start of the football season when the pregame hype video featured more than a split second of the former head coach’s iconic black shoes and rolled up pant legs like it had for so many years since 2012. Now, Paterno is included in the video, a small nod and an acknowledgment to the past eras of players and coaches who came through here.
“He’s a welcomed addition, a really great addition,” Sue Paterno, Joe’s widow, said of Kraft. The two met shortly after the athletic director was hired. “He wants to go back in time a little bit. He wants everybody happy again. … People are really optimistic with a new president and a new AD.”
D’Elia was impressed enough by Kraft and the opportunity to help that he asked Schiano if he could be lent back to Penn State — reminding him that more than a decade ago Paterno sent him to Piscataway. D’Elia has carved out a schedule that allows him to help at both places. He met with everyone involved in Penn State’s game day crew the week before the White Out game against Minnesota and was back trying to help see the event — his brainchild — through a clear set of eyes by the time the game rolled around on Oct. 22.
There’s still plenty to like about the experience at Beaver Stadium and how the crowd still lives and dies with every play, but D’Elia knows he also has to be critical and realistic about changes it needs to make.
“Penn State had drifted into a scripted method,” D’Elia said. “That’s easier to do. The most difficult one is no script, you’re flying off the seat of your pants, you’re calling music off of a sheet. It’s very particular what’s played when and each time because that will help the crowd get more into it. You’re hitting trigger points that they’re familiar with.”
Penn State wants to get back to a more organic game day experience. It’s D’Elia’s goal to help it get there and make sure everyone else in the department can learn from him.
Much like coaches scripting plays, he’s long operated off a color-coded call sheet and not behind a computer screen. Songs are broken down into various situations. There’s a list of songs to be played between plays, others at kickoff, others ahead of key third downs and others for pretty much any situation that may arise.
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Those songs are then divided into categories of green, yellow and orange. Green songs are the hits. They’re the ones that are good to be played anytime and they know the crowd will respond. Yellow are the ones that they throw in for variety. You won’t hear them every game. Orange is the category for songs they want to try to see how they work. They’ll study how the crowd responds, even going back to the camera they stick out of the press box window that’s focused on the band, the student section and the scoreboard. That’s how they can measure the crowd response and see if they made the right call at that moment or maybe if that song should be bumped down a category.
“You have to scrub your music list. You have to continually have input from other situations,” D’Elia said. “You must listen to other things. You must import other stuff. You must have students go to fraternity parties and say this is what they’re playing and this is how they’re reacting to it. Back in the day, we’d have people at the piano bar at Allen Street Grill and they’d tell us how people were responding to certain songs. We’d say OK, we’ll give it a try.”
Even “Kernkraft 400” was once in the orange category. D’Elia was intrigued by it but also knew it was one of those songs that had to be played only at certain points. His thinking was it needed to be played when Penn State really punched the other team in the mouth. They debuted it at a men’s basketball game around 2005 when the Nittany Lions forced the opponent to call a timeout.
“The students got unglued. It spread to the rest of the place and by the time it got to football we said we’re going to use it strictly as a payoff,” he said. “A pick, a fumble, even sometimes a significant sack that we had to have to stop a drive, we’re matching the mood of the crowd and how relieved they are about that. That’s when you hit Zombie like in your face. … The thing runs out of gas after about eight or 10 seconds.”
D’Elia loves watching soccer crowds in Europe because of the constant drones from the crowd and the non-stop energy they provide. It was while watching soccer around 2003 that he heard The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” He said he used Shazam to try to figure out what this song was that kept pulsing on and on throughout the match. He found it on a CD, and in an effort to protect what he felt would be a cool stadium moment at Penn State, he purposely bypassed the CD and took the song to the Blue Band’s director.
“Let’s go to the band because then it will take a whole year for anybody to pick it off of us,” D’Elia said. So, the band’s director wrote out the music and Penn State started using it once the offense crossed the 50-yard line and had the opponent on its heels. “We would be relentless with it. … We made it our thing and then a year later it was everywhere. Everyone just bludgeoned it to death.”
It’s the constant tinkering and the unpredictable nature of the game that makes those 3 1/2 hours on a game day fly by in what D’Elia estimates feels like 20 minutes. There has to be a turnaround song or three on the call sheet too — ones that can get the crowd feeling good even if the home team quickly finds itself down 17-0. Songs like “Apache,” “”La Bamba and “Kung Fu Fighting” have been D’Elia’s staples for those palate-cleansing moments that are bound to happen during a season.
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“It gets you out of your mood,” he said. “If you have to go down to that fourth song then the game is lost. You don’t want your crowd to drift and think, like, ‘Why’d I come here? This is awful.’ No. You have to change that.”
Throughout the week, the call sheet gets altered. With a chance of rain this Saturday afternoon when Maryland visits Beaver Stadium, D’Elia is already gearing up his list of rain songs — but not just any rain songs.
Like everything he aims to do, the crowd plays a part. It always has.
“You have to listen to the crowd and know which one works,” he said. “I always tell people, if it works, don’t be afraid to repeat it.”
(Top photo of Parker Washington: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
