Advertisement

Lights go out for 25 minutes during Saturday’s Ole Miss-Arkansas game

The promotional video Ole Miss shot before this year's basketball season features a shot of a pitch dark Tad Smith Coliseum and a player asking the question, "Are you ready to shut the lights off?"

Clearly, the Rebels took that a little too literally.

With 5:37 remaining in the first half on Saturday afternoon and Ole Miss leading Arkansas 24-21, the lights at the Tad Pad went dark.

It took 25 minutes for arena officials to get the lights back on, forcing both teams to leave the floor, return to their locker rooms and then warm up again once things were back to normal. Even after the lights came back on, arena officials apparently left the scoreboard off to conserve power.

Ole Miss pulled away when the lights returned and emerged with a 76-64 victory to move to 4-0 in the SEC, but Saturday's issues will only help those who insist the school is in need of an update for its basketball facilities.

The cramped, aging Tad Smith Coliseum opened during the 1965-66 season, making it one of the oldest arenas in the SEC. Last February, the Rebels women's basketball team actually had a game against Tennessee rained out when high winds from a particularly strong storm drove rain into the air vents at the top of the coliseum’s roof.

Give Ole Miss' band credit for having a sense of humor about Saturday's power outage. During the delay, they played Kanye's "All of the Lights." Clever.