Culture
How Penn State’s White Out — the stadium spectacle — ended up on Peacock
There was no made-for-television moment last spring as the Big Ten’s television draft unfolded. With a flurry of emails between CBS, NBC and Fox executives — plus a few follow-up phone calls to the conference to ensure contractual agreements were being met — each network consulted with its big board and planned how to best position its broadcast packages with its picks.
A network television draft for college football is every bit as sterile as it sounds.
“It’s just emails flying back and forth,” said Kerry Kenny, chief operating officer for the Big Ten Conference. “We benefit from all these partners working to make the Big Ten the best it can be, but at the end of the day, they’re all competitors. What’s good for Fox, what’s good for NBC, what’s good for CBS isn’t always good for the other network partners in that moment.”
The Big Ten is in the midst of a seven-year media rights agreement with Fox, CBS and NBC which began in July 2023. Penn State’s place in this agreement has been an interesting one in that so much of what fans have been accustomed to — like start times known for the White Out months in advance and the hope of playing Ohio State or Michigan in prime time for that White Out game — all look different now. Trying to protect Penn State’s annual White Out game and place it in a prime-time slot is harder than ever before.
This year, Penn State’s 16th full-stadium White Out will be played Saturday at 8 p.m. against Washington. The game comes on the heels of an emotional letdown after Penn State’s loss to No. 2 Ohio State. It feels strange that the annual spectacle with an envious atmosphere is being held this late in the season. It’s also odd that it won’t be found on traditional TV and instead will be streamed on Peacock.
How Penn State ended up here is the byproduct of trying to ensure the game is held at night like Penn State fans desired and athletic director Pat Kraft lobbied for, while making sure the network partners get what they desire. No, Penn State wasn’t necessarily relegated to Peacock but instead was slotted into a window that met the night game request.
When the television partners met in the spring to draft who picks which games first, second and third this week, Penn State had already made it clear that it hoped to have a White Out game in prime time.
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Thanks to an 18-team conference that spans three time zones and has more network partners than previous media rights agreements, fans must continue adapting. Only once before, in 2015, has the White Out been held in November. The 8 p.m. start time wasn’t announced until last Saturday.
Even the raucous, White Out environment that’s become the calling card for the Penn State fan base, a bucket-list item for sports fans and a made-for-TV spectacle, will be a little harder for fans to find Saturday with Peacock being a subscription-based streaming service. It’s the second time Penn State football has appeared on the platform, joining last year’s game against Delaware.
Still, in some ways, it might feel like a relegation, which comes just one week after State College was the epicenter of the sport, hosting ESPN’s “College GameDay” and Fox’s “Big Noon Kickoff.” But, part of the reason why the game ended up on Peacock is thanks to NBC’s long-standing relationship with Notre Dame. Part of that deal allows up to two games per year to be played in prime time on NBC. Florida State-Notre Dame was designated for the NBC prime-time slot well in advance of the Big Ten’s draft, Kenny said. However, NBC’s slot wasn’t the only option. Had Penn State beat Ohio State last week, this weekend’s game could’ve been at 3:30 p.m. on CBS or in prime time on Fox.
“We always knew that with NBC’s first selection that week, November 9, the Big Ten selection, whether it was the number one pick that week, the number two pick, or the number three pick among the three broadcast partners that was going to always end up on Peacock,” Kenny said.
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Another new twist this season is that the White Out will also be available in 23 different IMAX theaters, primarily catering to audiences in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Washington — inconveniently, the closest IMAX to Happy Valley is more than 90 minutes away in York, Pa. Still, it’ll be the first college football game presented live in select IMAX theaters, perhaps shedding light on what this next frontier of out-of-venue sports viewing could look like.
NBC tried a similar approach with the Olympic opening ceremonies this year in IMAX and also found success showing the 2024 NBA Finals in non-mainland China and the League of Legends championship in China and Korea. Depending on each theater’s food and beverage offerings this weekend, fans could drink beer, order dinner and experience the game in a different way — all without having to navigate Beaver Stadium postgame traffic.
“It’s the whole communal experience first of all and then we’ve specifically designed each of our theaters for the most immersive experience possible both from a visual and an audio standpoint,” said Mark Welton, global president of IMAX Theatres. “It really feels like you’re at the game. The crowd, the noise. … People are up cheering. It’s like kind of being in the stadium.”
Admittedly, the timing of the White Out, it being on Peacock and the possibility of watching it in IMAX all feels a little odd because Penn State’s biggest home game of the season — and one of the most important in Beaver Stadium history — was played last week at noon as part of Fox’s “Big Noon Kickoff.” For all the fan criticism of a noon kick — and there was plenty — the Big Noon exposure machine did its job. Penn State-Ohio State drew 9.94 million viewers, an uptick from the 7.3 million viewers who typically watch when the game has aired in prime time.
Last 25 Years of Ohio State-Penn State Games:
FOX Big Noon Games – 9.4 million viewers
All Other OSU-PSU Games – 7.3 million
Look forward to running it back next year. https://t.co/TvxPAMl84S
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) November 6, 2024
Fans will still show up in droves Saturday for the White Out, but this season Penn State has rolled out so many variations of a White Out theme — a “White Out energy” game against Illinois, a helmet stripe game, and a stripe out — that the lead up to Saturday feels different. Even head coach James Franklin, who usually wears white to his Monday media session the week of the White Out, didn’t do so this week. The whole tenor of the week coming off a loss to Ohio State doesn’t have the usual hype that comes in the lead-up to the annual stadium spectacle.
Part of the challenge moving forward will be how willing the Big Ten is to help Penn State with the White Out while recognizing that the TV partners hold the cards.
Kraft connected with the Big Ten last spring around draft time to state his case about what the White Out means to Penn State fans, the sport and the local community. It’s often used as a marquee recruiting weekend for other Penn State sports beyond football. Fans prefer the game to be held at night so the visual spectacle of 100,000-plus fans wearing white shirts and shaking white pompoms pops against the night sky. Hotels are booked months in advance.
Penn State knew Fox was making the Ohio State game Big Noon. It also knew the September home game against Illinois for homecoming would be at night. It could’ve either doubled up on homecoming and the White Out or done a noon White Out for Ohio State. Instead, it opted for Washington knowing that the start time would at the earliest be at 3:30 p.m. Penn State wanted time to make fans aware of the game theme — which it did in July — and wanted ample time to put all the usual marketing efforts behind it.
“Washington was unique because it’s a time of year where after daylight savings where a 3:30 game it gets dark pretty quick,” Kenny said. “We looked at that date and commissioner (Tony) Petitti and I spoke extensively with Pat about that.”
It’s never too early to peek ahead to Penn State’s 2025 home slate which includes games in Beaver Stadium against Oregon and Nebraska, among others. While a prime-time White Out against Oregon would seem like a shoo-in a few TV contracts ago, that’s far from a given now.
“We’re committed to making sure that this continues to find a way even in this new changing environment of college football that the White Out is a tradition that has some legs to survive and really thrive in the future,” Kenny said.
(Photo: Dan Rainville / USA Today)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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