Ohio Stadium fails to unnerve Rutgers junior
For some, the prospect of possibly playing in front of about 108,000 people who don’t want to see you succeed would be a frightful task. After all, that’s basically twice the capacity of High Point Solutions Stadium, where the Rutgers football team plays home games.
But the challenge becomes even greater when you understand the opponent you are facing and the name of the venue. It’s nothing like playing Temple at Lincoln Financial Field or Washington State at CenturyLink Field, home of the defending Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks.
This Saturday will be unlike any game before for the Scarlet Knights. Rutgers will play its first road Big Ten game of the season, and it will come against Ohio State at “The Horseshoe,” one of the most storied venues in college football.
While it would seem to affect most people having to go into a hostile environment like Ohio Stadium, it doesn’t seem to bother most Knights. One in particular said he is used to worse from prior experience.
“A lot of people have never played in something like that. But for me personally, dealing with basketball, I have been in that type of situation where the fans are hostile,” said junior left tackle Keith Lumpkin. “In AAU basketball and high school basketball, I’ve played at the Prudential Center and all over the place. It’s hostile, and if you’re not used to it, and you can’t adjust to it, it can hurt you.”
Other Knights also don’t feel the crowd size will necessarily affect them.
Redshirt freshman offensive lineman Dorian Miller is on the cusp of starting his first-ever game with Rutgers if senior center Betim Bujari — questionable with a lower body injury — is unable to play this weekend.
While Miller comes from Group I Metuchen (New Jersey) High School, he doesn’t feel any extra nerves playing against the Buckeyes in one of the biggest college venues. Miller thinks the atmosphere will actually make him play better.
“That’s great, that’s real great,” Miller said when asked about playing in front of 100,000 people. “It’s what you dream of, and that’s exactly why I came here — to play against Ohio State, to play against Michigan and Penn State. It’s what you dream of. … It’s a lot different than Metuchen on a Saturday night.”
With such a hostile crowd expected in Columbus, Rutgers is taking measures during the week of practice to prepare ways to communicate non-verbally and simulate the crowd noise, said head coach Kyle Flood.
“We have a method to prepare for crowd noise in general. Once you get to the point where you can't communicate verbally, I'm not sure it matters if it's 70, 80, 90, 100 [thousand],” Flood said. “We expect it to be a hostile environment. We expect it to be an environment where we can't communicate verbally. So we'll do all the things during the week with the crowd noise that we normally would do.”
But for Lumpkin, the crowd won’t even come close to negatively affecting his game. It will actually go to lengths to help him, he said.
“I love big games like this. That’s when I play better and better as the game goes on and on,” he said. “I’ve been playing in this kind of atmosphere since I was 10. It’s just 100,000 people watching me getting ready to kick their butt.”
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