Saturday’s game, for the most part, won’t be anything new. The No. 21 Michigan football team first played Purdue in 1890, a few years before the Wolverines played any other current Big Ten opponent. Michigan has faced off against the Boilermakers 60 times since then. Over those 135 years of the conference’s longest-standing matchup, several generations of players from both teams have passed through each program, the NFL and life itself.
So perhaps it’s fitting that the newest element of Saturday’s contest won’t take place on the field. The latest development in a game that’s been played for decades longer than Michigan Stadium’s been around isn’t a new rule, a new player or a new coach.
On Saturday, when the Wolverines kick off against Purdue 40 minutes after the sun dips beneath the trees, Michigan Stadium will feature its sixth ever light show with its new LEDs. It’s a nighttime addition that came with the stadium’s renovations in 2023.
“We had been discussing it for a while,” Jake Stocker, Michigan’s Director of Game Presentation and Fan Experience, told The Michigan Daily. “It was really an infrastructure update to the stadium, we partnered with Muscoe and put in LED lights in the stadium. Not only did it allow us to do these light shows and have these additional pieces, it was also a cost-saving measure and a power-saving measure for the University as well by us upgrading these lights, because now they’re all LED controlled where before they were all halogen based, so it just saves us a lot of power.”
In [2010](https://mgoblue.com/news/2023/8/22/football-michigan-stadium-to-feature-new-led-lighting-system-for-2023-24-season), Michigan moved on from temporary lights set up around the concourse to install high-intensity discharge bulbs (HIDs) in towers on either side of the stadium.
Despite being the standard at the time, these lights consumed so much energy that Stocker remembers having to wait 10 minutes after they were turned off to turn them back on. The HIDs were expensive, and individual bulbs died frequently.
“It used to happen a lot with the old system, and it would be kind of a pain to take the fixture down, replace the ball and put it back up,” Paul Dunlop, Michigan’s Associate Athletic Director for Facility Operations, told The Daily. “Knock on wood, we have had no failures of any fixtures so far.”
Today, LED bulbs occupy 280 fixtures equally divided into four quadrants around Michigan Stadium. Two hundred and twenty-four of those are standard game lights, while the other 56 are RGBA, bulbs that mix red, green, blue and amber to cast over 16 million different hues across the stands and onto the field.
When the Big House is soaked in blue, whether during a timeout or at some point throughout the “Mr. Brightside” tradition in the third quarter, the standard game lights are turned off while the RGBAs stay on — a lighting luxury enabled by the new LEDS.
LED bulbs are the standard for stadiums across the country, and are more cost effective and energy efficient than any alternatives. When they were installed, the system was expected to reduce energy consumption by 31%. On each end of Michigan’s East and West Stadium towers, the fixtures are carefully positioned for the best coverage.
“It’s pretty sophisticated in terms of how those are all aimed,” Dunlop said. “It’s not just random. The electricians, the contractors that install these things, they don’t just throw them up any which way. It’s very precise, and it’s computer modeled how each of those fixtures is aimed.”
During the game, Stocker and his team take over, using a Digital Multiplex (DMX) controller to manage all 280 fixtures with a single tool. Most of the sequences are programmed and tested in the preseason, but Stocker likes to make little tweaks and adjustments before each night game.
Michigan is 16-2 in night games at the Big House, and undefeated with the new LEDs. Against Purdue, the Wolverines are poised to continue their winning streak under the lights.