Penn State needs white-out for Temple tickets

Settle down, Penn State fans, your precious all-stadium White House is still reserved for the top dogs of college football.

As for those season tickets mailed out saying "EVERYONE WEAR WHITE!" on the ticket for the Temple game? Simply miscommunication between the athletic department and ticket designers.

"The bottom line, internally between what we decided as what we wanted to have on the tickets and what was designed and placed, it was obviously miscommunication," said Greg Myford, associate athletic director for communications and marketing, adding the mixup could have stemmed from last year's White House game against Iowa falling on the same weekend as this year's Temple game.

A White House game in 2010 was not discussed at all, said Myford, who is taking responsibility for the error.

"I'm not typically signing off on art work, but clearly the design of the art work and what we communicate to our fans comes out of one of the departments that I'm responsible for," he said.

Penn State blogs and message boards blew up, denouncing the White House as a broken record if the athletic department was pitching its premier game-day spectacle against an opponent that hadn't beaten the Nittany Lions since 1941. Penn State is 35-3-1 all-time against Temple, including last year's 31-6 win Sept. 19 at Beaver Stadium.

"No disrespect to Temple or anything, the White House tradition, it started with Notre Dame in 2007," said Alex Cohen, president of the student group Paternoville, which meets with the athletic department to orchestrate ideas for the upcoming season. "It's one of those special things for certain games."

Nationally televised night games against Illinois in 2008 and Iowa in 2009 are the only other times the entire stadium has been doused in white. Typically, the event is saved for marquee opponents, or when there's a revenge factor, such as last year's Big Ten opener against the Hawkeyes, who knocked Penn State out of national title contention the year before.

Cohen's counterpart, Kevin Woerner, president of Temple's student section, Cherry Crusade, had no idea of the mixup but takes some offense at the outcry from Penn State's fan base deeming the Owls unworthy of a big-time atmosphere.

Still, despite a nine-win season and the program's first bowl appearance in 30 years, Temple just doesn't fit the criteria for what a full-stadium White House should be, Woerner said.

"It's probably one of [the] toughest places to play, and it would have prepared us very well for our back schedule," he said. "The main thing was the White House is for prime-time games on TV."

Kickoff time for the Sept. 25 Penn State-Temple game hasn't been announced.

The White House, for which fans in the stadium are encouraged to wear white, is the brainchild of Guido D'Elia, Penn State's director for communications and branding. D'Elia posted Sunday night on Twitter that the tickets sent out had a misprint, and confirmed the next White House would likely come against Alabama in 2011.

His post said: "Not so fast! . . . Next "whitehouse" at Beav is Bama 2011 & not 9/25/10 as mis-printed on 2010 season tickets . . . bad computer! bad!!"