ADVERTISEMENT College Football Kickoff 2026 At Illinois, College Football’s Largest Videoboard Takes Game-Day Production to a New Scale By: Brandon Costa, Director of Digital • Posted on: September 2, 2026 • 11 minute read ADVERTISEMENT The 17,315-sq.-ft. display at Gies Memorial Stadium debuts Thursday night, capping a multi-year technology overhaul for Fighting Illini Productions Former University of Illinois sprinter Devin Quinn is the fastest man in Big Ten history by the slimmest of margins. His 10.01-second run in the 100 meters at the 2019 NCAA Championships clipped the previous conference record — also held by an Illini, Andrew Riley — by one one-hundredth of a second. Illinois Athletics has taken a considerably less subtle approach to its latest record. When the Fighting Illini open the 2026 football season at Gies Memorial Stadium on Thursday night against UAB, the south end zone will be dominated by a 17,315-sq.-ft. Daktronics videoboard, the largest in college football by a whopping 6,652 -sq.-ft. The next-biggest, at Auburn, checks in at 10,690 sq. ft. Not exactly a photo finish. University of Illinois’ new videoboard at Gies Memorial Field is the largest screen at a college football venue in the country by a sizable margain. For Derryl Myles, Senior Associate Director of Athletics, Fighting Illini Productions & Technology , there is really only one way to fully grasp the scale. “Pictures and video just don’t do it justice by the size of what it is,” he says. “It is a spectacle that you need to see in person to get the sheer size of it.” At approximately 69 ft. high by 250 ft. wide, the display contains 16 million pixels at 10-mm pixel spacing. It is roughly the same size as the main outfield display at Citi Field, 3.4 times the size of the main board at Soldier Field, and would rank among the five largest displays in professional football. By some rough math, it would take 1,621 60-in. televisions to cover it. For Myles and the Fighting Illini Productions team, however, the challenge is not simply putting bigger pictures on a bigger screen. The dimensions of the canvas have forced the production and creative teams to reconsider how they build nearly every part of the in-venue show. “Putting video on it and the size of the canvas has been — I don’t want to say challenging — but it’s just a different way for us to have to think about it,” says Myles. “How long it takes for us to be rendering these videos out, rendering animations out, it takes a little bit longer for us to do it. So we have to be a lot more thoughtful in what we’re doing. Our preparation, the runway, needs to be a little bit longer.” With Great Size Comes Unique Creative Challenges The extreme width of the display creates an unusual creative problem: conventional 16:9 video does not naturally fit it. “If we go full board, full image, we’re losing 50% of the image on the board once you scale it,” says Myles. “That becomes a little tricky in terms of positioning and making sure the picture is on the board the way we want it to.” That doesn’t mean Fighting Illini Productions will shy away from letting the board loose. Major moments, including the team’s intro video and NFL-style starting-lineup presentation, are designed to consume the entire canvas. For much of the game, however, live video will reside in a dedicated window, leaving significant space around it for statistics, graphics, fan features, sponsorship inventory, and other information. Counterintuitively, having the biggest videoboard in college football has pushed the creative team toward restraint. “Knowing how big the canvas was, there was a lot of thought in making sure that we don’t go super busy with it,” Myles says. “Even though the canvas is big, it’s kind of simplistic in what we’ve applied to it.” The extra acreage allows Illinois to keep information visible without constantly taking live video off the board. Elements that previously required a full-screen takeover can now live alongside the game feed. Fan photos and other features can occupy their own video windows, while Myles expects statistics to become a much more prominent part of the presentation. Daktronics Show Control and Camino are central to that strategy. Camino provides real-time rendering, data-based logic, timeline-based content, and the ability to develop visuals in 2D and 3D environments. “Stats, we’re going to go heavy into stats,” says Myles. “Camino has really helped us out in regards to how we’re going to facilitate that and how that looks on the board.” Fighting Illini Productions has also worked with Daktronics and third-party creative partners, including Justin Peterson at BallerFX , to develop content specifically for the new dimensions. And It’s Not Just One Giant Screen The south end-zone display is the centerpiece, but the scope of the installation goes well beyond it. Daktronics installed 16 LED displays totaling more than 26,750 sq. ft. and 30 million pixels throughout Gies Memorial Stadium. A new north-end-zone super ribbon measures approximately 12.5 ft. high by 180 ft. wide, while two sideline ribbons stretch roughly 427 ft. apiece along the seating fascia. Two field-level displays each measure nearly 5.5 ft. high by 34 ft. wide. Eight additional bleacher displays, each measuring about 5.5 ft. by 12 ft. with a tighter 2.9-mm pixel spacing, provide more locations for statistics, graphics, and sponsorship messaging. Even the backside of the massive south board is being put to work. Two outward-facing displays, each measuring 29.5 ft. high by 52.5 ft. wide, will greet fans outside the stadium with pregame hype content, promotional messaging, postgame scores and victory graphics, and university and sponsor content. Inside the bowl, Myles’ team has had to think about all of the displays as pieces of one canvas. “We’ve sectioned it out pretty well, not just the big boy Megatron in the south, but the north board as well, the super ribbon, working with that too,” he says. Game 1 Is Only the Beginning Illinois has already put the system through rehearsals, including a recent session with the football team to test starting-lineup elements and portions of the game-day show. Myles, coaches, and staff watched from inside the stadium and immediately identified adjustments. That, he says, is exactly the point. “There are going to be a lot of eyeballs on this bad boy,” says Myles. “This is a living, breathing entity that’s going to evolve.” The expectation inside Fighting Illini Productions is that the presentation fans see in the season opener will not be the same one they see by October — and perhaps not even the same one they see one week later. “What we do in Game 1, we’ll change to Game 2 and Game 3,” he says. “It might not be a full year until we say, OK, we feel good with this. These are the things we like to do. These are the things we want to stay away from. It’s learning, unlearning some things we used to do, and learning some new things.” The learning curve will be particularly steep on opening night because the new videoboards are not the only toys debuting inside the stadium. Illinois’ broader venue refresh also includes new Musco LED lighting and show-control capabilities, an upgraded stadium audio system, enhanced Wi-Fi, and an overhaul of broadcast cabling and connectivity. “There are going to be a lot of eyeballs on this bad boy,” – Derryl Myles, Senior Associate Director of Athletics, Fighting Illini Productions & Technology, University of Illinois Opening with a night game means Myles’ crew must learn how to integrate the new lighting system into the presentation immediately rather than easing into it with a daytime kickoff. “This is our first time with this type of lighting capability, so we’re trying to learn it on the fly,” he says. “To have your first game coming out of the gate being a night game, it just increased the learning curve.” Still, Myles is confident the Illini have something ready for the home crowd. “We got something in the hopper that I think our fans will enjoy.” The Technology Behind the Screen Of course, a 17,315-sq.-ft. display is only as powerful as the production infrastructure feeding it. That portion of the project began a year earlier. Ahead of the 2025 football season, Illinois completed the first phase of an overhaul of its centralized production control room inside the Bielfeldt Athletics Administration Building, which is connected via fiber to both Gies Memorial Stadium and State Farm Center. Working with systems integrator Tab M Solutions, Fighting Illini Productions moved from a primarily baseband SDI operation to a hybrid SMPTE ST 2110/SDI architecture, creating the technical foundation required for the new videoboard. “We did the control-room upgrade, went from baseband SDI to a complete overhaul into an IP environment,” says Myles. “We had to go through that upgrade first in order to prepare for the videoboard and scope.” The system includes Grass Valley LDX 150 cameras, a Ross Video production switcher, an Evertz router running within the MAGNUM environment, and Evertz DreamCatcher replay. Illinois also works with Wave Central on RF and Bolin Technology on robotic cameras. Six LDX 150 cameras are deployed natively over ST 2110, connecting from the venues directly into the core IP infrastructure without traditional baseband CCUs. A Grass Valley CCS-ONE server centralizes camera shading and monitoring. The football production itself has expanded from five field cameras to eight. Equally important was the move in resolution. Illinois had been a 1080i house and upgraded to 1080p in preparation for the board. A move to 4K remains part of the next phase of the department’s production roadmap. The centralized room primarily drives football and men’s and women’s basketball videoboard shows, but Illinois has also designed it to coexist with its Big Ten Network StudentU operation. A back bench enables simultaneous productions, while a smaller StudentU control room at State Farm Center, overseen by Paul Morehouse , has been equipped in part with repurposed gear from the previous generation of the Illinois system. Students Get a Seat at the Table Myles’ football videoboard crew totals 19, mixing freelancers and students from the Fighting Illini Productions program. For Myles, who arrived at Illinois in 2004 and launched Fighting Illini Productions after developing his own skills as a student with HuskerVision at the University of Nebraska, giving students meaningful game-day roles remains central to the operation. “We use it as an opportunity,” he says. “These are kids who are coming in here right away, they kind of know what they want to do, they want to get into this, and they’re super passionate about it. We’re going to try to see if we can jumpstart their career here at Illinois.” That means freshmen can earn spots on the football crew, while more experienced students move into increasingly significant positions. One student is returning this fall after spending the summer working replay on professional sports productions in Chicago and will operate replay for Illinois football. It will mark the first time in more than a decade that a student has occupied that position on Myles’ football crew. The ability to tap into the Chicago production market and bring those experiences back to Champaign, Myles says, benefits the entire program. More Than Two Decades in the Making For Myles, the completion of the control-room overhaul and arrival of the biggest videoboard in college football represent a milestone in an Illinois career now stretching beyond two decades. The scope has also presented a different kind of education. “I’ve learned a lot about working with vendors,” he says. “Just having the sheer amount of projects that are going on at the same time and the amount of meetings that you have to be involved with — I’ve gotten really good at follow-up emails.” More seriously, the undertaking has pushed Myles and his staff technically, operationally, and creatively. “It has been a learning curve, but also a blessing,” he says. “It has made me better. I’ll say that. This process has made me better, and hopefully our fans appreciate what we’re getting ready to bring to the table.” Whether every pixel, window, statistic, animation, and lighting cue is exactly where Myles ultimately wants it on Thursday night remains to be seen. But one thing is certain. Nobody in Gies Memorial Stadium is going to miss the screen. 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