A Halloween crowd at Beaver Stadium looked a lot more like a ghost town than a Big Ten home game.
Penn State hosted Purdue on Saturday afternoon, and while the official attendance was listed at 102,041, the scene inside the newly renovated stadium told a different story. Empty seats were everywhere, and the most common costume on display seemed to be exactly that.
Three weeks earlier, Beaver Stadium had been packed for the first White Out game in the renovated building, when 114,419 fans turned out to watch USC beat Penn State 31-23. Since then, though, the Nittany Lions have slid into a four-game losing streak, and the energy around the program has drained fast.
Tickets were going for less than $10 on the secondary market before the 4:15 p.m. ET kickoff, but even that didn’t seem enough to fill the place.
It is Halloween, of course, and there are other things competing for attention on a Friday night. Still, it’s hard to look at the turnout and not wonder how different the building would have felt if Penn State were playing well and still in the College Football Playoff conversation.
The frustration from the fan base is showing up in more ways than one. Plenty of supporters are willing to give Matt Campbell a pass in Year 1.
He arrived late after a messy coaching search, with athletic director Pat Kraft having publicly missed on BYU head coach Kalani Sitake. That left Campbell little time to build from scratch, so he brought 24 former Iowa State players with him to Happy Valley and inherited only remnants of a recruiting class.
The patience, though, does not seem to extend to Kraft. He took the gamble by moving on from James Franklin, a bold call a year after a CFP semifinal appearance, and he also pushed through the $700 million Beaver Stadium renovations.
The upgrades increased capacity slightly, but they also changed the higher-level sightlines in favor of premium seating and more revenue. In a lot of cases, the views are worse and the tickets cost more.
Maybe that’s just where college football is headed in 2026. But for longtime Penn State fans, it can feel like a broken promise. And when that arrives alongside one of the roughest starts to a season in years, it’s no surprise the crowd showed up in costume - and a lot of those costumes looked like empty seats.
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