PMP 25: Music & College Sports

We continue on with Pick My Post requests from my May fundraiser. And this one is very well aligned with the fundraiser itself. I'm raising funds for the scholarship in my dad's name at my high school, a scholarship which exists to encourage students to pursue music beyond high school, either as their major or just as an activity in college. So it fits well that this PMP request was...

Write about all of the different ways a sports program (say, football) is connected to music—not just the band, but what the players and team listen to, how it's used in practices, ambient music for the fans, what goes into hype videos and recruiting... I'm sure there are tons of connections that the average fan never sees. Is there some kind of "music coordinator" for the team, or is it just one of the grad assistants that gets that job?

First I'll list my music nerd bona fides. If there's a college music scholarship at my high school in my dad's name, you can assume that music was a big part of my life growing up. My aunt taught piano lessons and I started those when I was five. I also chose percussion when fifth grade came around so that meant I was the guy on the tympani in concert band and the guy on the snare drum at halftime on Friday night. I wanted to be in the Marching Illini in college and intended to try out my sophomore year (I was in symphonic band my freshman year at Illinois) but my major, Landscape Architecture, had a M-W-F studio class and a Tu-Th studio class from 2:00 to 5:00 so MI, with something like 3:30 or 4:00 pm rehearsals at the time, was off the table for me. At least that's what my advisor told me when I suggested trying out for the Marching Illini.

So I have deep music roots. While the rest of you can brag about being 2nd team All Conference in football your senior year of high school, my brags are winning the Sousa Award as the top senior in band and the Arion Award as the top senior in choir. And when I boast about being named Most Talented in the senior superlatives of my high school yearbook, it had nothing to do with my tennis serve. It's because I was The Music Guy.

That means I'm probably uniquely qualified to answer this question. Music remains a big part of my life. I mean, how many posts have I written based on the lyrics from some song? I even put Mahler's 2nd Symphony behind the 2019 Michigan State highlights once. I am not your normal meathead sports blogger.

It's likely that music plays a big role in the fact that I'm 90% college sports and 10% professional sports. What other sport has a marching band on the field? What NBA arena has a pep band in the stands playing Birdland? The fact that the student musicians are in the stands playing for the student athletes is yet another reason college sports are the best.

I'll use someone other than the Marching Illini here (because I know I'm biased) but... doesn't this make a college football game 94% better? Sound up...

(If I may, there is nothing like the feeling of playing in a really tight snare line. It has to be the most aggressive form of music. You can't help but make the face.)

That's our starting point. Music is fully integrated into college sports and it's the students providing that part as well. It's the best.

But this question goes beyond that to ask how music is integrated into practices and other team events. The question was about football, but let me tell a basketball story real quick.

One fun thing about getting to the State Farm Center well before a game or staying well after a game: sometimes it's just a player shooting hoops and hooking his phone up to the aux cord. If the system is on (if they haven't torn everything down on the sideline because there's some concert coming up or whatever), then Illini players will sometimes come into the State Farm Center, hook their phone up to the system, start their favorite playlist, and play their own music throughout the arena as they shoot threes.

I remember taking this photo of Brandin Podziemski in 2022 after the Iowa win when he did exactly that. The timestamp here says 11:35 pm, and that was a 6:30 game, so this is nearly three hours after the game ended. You can still see the confetti on the floor (that's when we clinched a share of the Big Ten title). Podziemski came out (still in uniform from the game), hooked his phone up to the aux cord, put on his favorite playlist, and shot threes:

What a dream, right? Playing your favorite music through dozens of speakers hanging from the ceiling in an empty Big Ten arena.

For football, music is a huge part of practice. When practices were open to the public (in Rantoul and over on Florida Avenue), fans would sometimes complain about the music. But it's used for two purposes. One, coaches want their players to be able to communicate on the field without using words (to prepare for, say, a noisy road game). And two – how do I say this – at some point practice feels weird without it? The music is turned off for a lot of drills (especially if the coaches are instructing the full team), but for individual drills, there's a certain "pace" to practice which is often set by the music.

Here's a few practice videos so you can get a sense of what I'm saying. All individual drills have music in the background like this:

And while hiphop is by far the most common music at practice (and by far the most popular music with the players), practice is not just music I'm not familiar with. Here's a warmup drill with some AC/DC:

It's not just Bielema's staff that plays music at practice. I've covered practices under Zook, Beckman, Cubit, Lovie, and Bielema and I'd say that Zook was the only one that limited music at practice. Here's a video from the final open-to-the-public training camp in 2019 (when it was held over at the Florida Avenue fields - Lovie is in the white long-sleeve shirt). I believe that's Matt Robinson at QB?

It's funny how I've gone from "what's all this racket?" to "it feels empty without it" over the years. There's just something... stabilizing about the music in the background at practice.

As for who sets it up, I don't have any specific answers for you. There are so many staffers at practice now. Someone is obviously on the volume button because if Coach Bielema whistles something dead and calls everyone in to the center of the field to talk about something, the music immediately goes off. And practices are scripted (now featuring a voice-over!) where the music will die down, you'll hear "Period 5, specialists. Period 5, specialists" and then everyone knows where to go for the next phase of practice (offensive linemen, for example, aren't part of those drills so they head to the corner to do some individual work).

I asked around and I do know that Nate McNeal used to be in charge of all the music. He was here for the first three years of Lovie's tenure, then he left for Temple with Thad Ward, then Bielema brought him here as the Director of Personnel in 2021, then Syracuse hired him away by offering him the GM position in 2024, and now we hired him back in February as Executive Director of Player Evaluations and Acquisitions. (For those of you following the money in the Big Ten and SEC vs. the Big 12 and ACC, please note here that we spent money this offseason to take the #1 guy in the Syracuse recruiting department and make him the #2 here.)

Perhaps it's McNeal in charge of the playlist again. Perhaps it's a student assistant. Perhaps it's Briella Bielema. Whoever it is, it's hiphop, some old rock, and a tiny bit of country. Which makes me 🤷‍♂️ and then 🤘 and then 😴. Sorry, not a country guy. The bros ruined it.

To be clear, it's not always music that's used to prep for away games. I've walked by the stadium before on my way to some post-practice press conference and you can hear very loud pumped-in crowd noise in the stadium as the team is finishing practice. Those speakers are also used to simulate the road environment. It's just that most of the time, they're backdrop music at practice.

And yes, music is also used for hype. I've walked past enough locker rooms (football and basketball) after wins to hear players losing their minds to whatever song is on. That's probably why the staffer with the aux cord is a very important part of the staff. He or she has to land the plane after a big win. They need to flare that thing and touch down perfectly. Maybe that's how I should close this post.

Music speaks to us on a different level. It can set the mood. Movies have soundtracks so they can speak directly to the mood. A tense scene in a horror movie cannot be paired with circus music.

A victorious locker room can be framed the same way. The music must speak to the players. When I get back to the fire truck after a big football victory I want to hear some Pearl Jam, but if I had the aux in the locker room after a win and I played "Alive", it would not meet the mood. It must speak to them, not me.

So check out Giorgi Bezhanishvili and Andres Feliz in this video from 2019. We had just beaten a top-10 team for the first time in forever. We were 8-15 on the season at this point (Underwood's second season), but after knocking off #9 Michigan State at home (in the "this won't end well for Illinois" game), there was reason to celebrate. Every Illini fan driving home that night felt hope for the first time in forever.

Which meant that the music had to match the mood. Whoever had the locker room aux chose Stick Talk by Future (yes, I had to ask my son). And check out the mood of the players. The music needs to meet them right there, and it met them right there:

College sports forever. With a soundtrack.