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MADISON, Wis. -- David Gilreath never planned on becoming a Wisconsin Badger. Instead, he arrived for a visit intent on reaffirming his commitment to Minnesota. The wide receiver prospect attended high school 12 miles from the Metrodome and hadnt experienced a college game anywhere else.Then, he witnessed the power of Camp Randall Stadium.You get a sense of what college football is supposed to be like as far as the fans, said Gilreath, who found himself looking into the stands as much as he watched Wisconsin beat Penn State back in 2006. Being out there, it was pretty crazy, seeing the Jump Around, seeing the wave they do, seeing the chants, how packed it was. I wasnt used to that. I remember that being the main factor. That was one of the main factors of saying Im going to Wisconsin -- the stadium.So it was only fitting that four years later, Gilreath would be responsible for producing one of the most memorable and loudest plays in the stadiums long history when he returned the opening kickoff 97 yards for a touchdown against No. 1 Ohio State. As the crowd of 81,194 erupted under the lights of a primetime matchup, the ground shook beneath Gilreaths cleats. It felt, Gilreath said, like a movie starring the players. They rode that emotion to a 31-18 upset victory, and students stormed the field to share in the revelry with the team.I think it has to be one of the best atmospheres in college football, Gilreath said. This is a huge stage youre on, and fans are right on top of you. It overwhelms the other players a little bit.The Xs and Os are important. Camp Randall Stadium, however, could represent one of No. 8 Wisconsins biggest advantages when No. 2 Ohio State visits Saturday night (8 p.m. ET, ABC). The Badgers playoff dreams are at stake, and theyre listed as a 10.5-point underdog. But, as Gilreath or anyone else who has played there will tell you, dont overlook the Camp Randall affect, particularly at night.It was pretty nuts for a 3:30 kick, said Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, whose last visit there was a 2012 overtime victory. Its going to be loud -- really loud.Camp Randall Stadium, the fourth-oldest facility in the FBS, provides a home-field advantage that is generally considered among the best in the country. Since the start of the 2004 season, Wisconsin has compiled a 75-9 record there (.893 winning percentage). Among Power 5 programs, only Ohio State (80-9, .899) has won a higher percentage of its home games in that time frame.During big night games, when Camp Randall is the center of the nations attention as it will be Saturday, the place is notably manic. Its so loud even Jim Harbaugh was speechless back when he played at Michigan. And with all due respect to Virginia Techs heavy metal entrance from Metallicas Enter Sandman or Tennessees rendition of Rocky Top, nobody rocks like Wisconsin when Jump Around blares through the stereo system.Come for the football, stay for the party and even walk home through a Civil War camp. When you say Wis-con-sin, youve said it all.Theres a game thats labeled homecoming, but every game is a homecoming, I think, for people at Camp Randall, said Matt Lepay, in his 23rd season as the Badgers football radio play-by-play announcer. Its a social gathering, and the fact the team has been pretty good more often than not makes it that much better. Its more than a football game that gets people there.?This is the longest delay I have ever seen because of crowd noiseMichigan quarterback Jim Harbaugh backed away from center, pointed toward a referee and placed his hands on his hips, incredulous as boos rained down with strength and vitriol.It was Oct. 4, 1986, and No. 4 Michigan was in town to face Wisconsin in the first night game in Camp Randall Stadium history. The Badgers werent a particularly good team, but damned if the 75,898 fans in attendance werent going to turn the event into a raucous occasion.As Harbaugh drove Michigan in the third quarter toward the north end zone and Wisconsins student section, the collective roar reached an ear-splitting decibel level, to the point that Harbaugh claimed teammates could not hear his signals. For 10 minutes, Harbaugh repeated the process of crouching under center, walking away and then trying again, only to complain to officials. It marked the second occasion that night in which he delayed the game. Each time, the crowd grew more incensed.This is the longest delay Ive ever seen because of crowd noise, an announcer said on the television broadcast.Camp Randall Stadium has become known as one of the rowdiest venues in the Big Ten, if not the country, because of a fan base that exudes passion -- even if that passion can occasionally manifest itself in detrimental ways. Former Iowa coach Hayden Fry once called Camp Randall the worst place in the world to take a visiting team to play, which occurred after he said eggs were thrown at coaches and players, and beer and peppermint schnapps were poured on the team as well.Still, the electric atmosphere that pings through the stadium during big games is usually unforgettable, as it was 30 years ago, when Michigan coach Bo Schembechler bemoaned the ridiculously loud noise and chastised the entire Wisconsin crowd.I promise you, I will not allow the Michigan crowd to do that, and they wont, he told reporters afterward. People who come into our stadium are treated courteously.The incident was eerily similar to a November game six years earlier, when Michigan quarterback John Wangler refused to snap the ball inside Camp Randall because of excessive crowd noise. Seven times, Wangler backed away from the line of scrimmage, as Michigan faced a fourth-and-one at the Wisconsin 4-yard line.Following two warnings, referee Glenn Fortin assessed Wisconsin a timeout on the third occasion. Then, he took away the Badgers second and third timeouts. When those punishments failed, Fortin handed out two delay-of-game penalties, moving the ball to the 2-yard line and then the 1. Michigan scored the next play on a run from tailback Butch Woolfolk.I was in the stands, former Wisconsin athletics director and Badgers All-American receiver Pat Richter recalled. I remember seeing a friend of ours come racing down the stairway and Im thinking, What the hell is he doing? He got down around the fences behind the bench. He was hollering at Schembechler. He was madder than the dickens.Only Bo could have gotten something like that. All you need to do is warn the fans its too noisy. You know what youre going to get. It was quite the scene.Even the first documented complaints of excessive crowd noise at a college football game trace their roots back to Madison. According to the David M. Nelson book The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules and the Men who Made the Game, famed Chicago Maroons coach Amos Alonzo Stagg claimed his team didnt win a 1914 game at Randall Field because of overzealous fans.Chicagos left end, John Vruwink, became rattled because several Wisconsin supporters were cheering loudly with megaphones near the corner of the end zone. Instead of holding a block for his fullback, he pulled into the backfield amid the hysteria and collided heads with him. The game ended in a 0-0 tie, in what Nelson wrote, may have been the first outdoors crowd-noise interference.After all these years, some things never change.Kevin cranked that on, and the place went nutsRyan Sondrups football career had ended prematurely because of an injury, and the former Badgers tight end began his last school year yearning for a way to fill the void. When he opted for a volunteer role with Wisconsins athletic marketing department in 1998, he couldnt have known that search would spawn one of the great traditions in college football.Sondrup, who spent three seasons on the team, believed part of the game-day experience felt stale and inquired with his bosses about how to enhance fan involvement. The response: Create a list of ideas and get back to us. Several concepts fell by the wayside, but one that seemed feasible to Sondrup was compiling a CD playlist to amp up the crowd.One night at Wandos, a popular downtown bar and grill, Sondrup and a few friends on the team began scrolling through the Jukebox. Up popped House of Pains 1992 hit Jump Around, a song with a high-energy introduction that encouraged everyone to -- what else? -- jump around.Eyebrows raised, and the group shared a collective thought: Hey, this could be something.That was our big moment, our big momentum-building idea to get the student section raucous, so to speak, Sondrup said.Sondrup presented his playlist to Kevin Kluender, an assistant marketing director at Wisconsin. Earlier in the season, Kluender had been searching for the right entertainment combination before the fourth quarter began. The stadium featured a primitive message board with a student section race, the dots ticking frame-by-frame across the screen. Kluender would follow up by playing a random song.But everything changed during Wisconsins only home night game that season on Oct. 10, 1998, against Purdue. Boilermakers quarterback Drew Brees was in the process of setting an NCAA passing record by completing 55 of 83 throws, and the game had begun to drag on. After the third quarter, Kluender scanned Sondrups playlist trying to liven up the fan base. He settled on Jump Around.My back was sort of to the student section a little bit, Kluender said. I could see that people are pointing and looking. I turned around and saw everyone jumping. It just kind of looked like popcorn. You had never seen anything like that.Added Sondrup: Kevin cranked that on, and the place went nuts.The stadium shook and the press box swayed, infusing a new energy into Camp Randall. Wisconsin went on to win the game 31-24 on its way to a Rose Bowl appearance.Kluender played the song during Wisconsins final two home games, but it wasnt until the following season when he realized what a gem the school had on its hands. Even during nonconference blowouts against overmatched opponents, students stayed in their seats just so they could bob their heads and hop up and down to Jump Around.Controversy briefly followed in 2003, when Richter, then the athletics director, asked for the song not to be played in the home opener against Akron because the stadium was under construction, and he feared the shaking could be dangerous. Outrage reached such high levels that Chancellor John D. Wiley was forced to step in. He announced Jump Around could be played the next week during a home game against UNLV after a study determined the building would remain structurally sound.Man, you shouldve seen the people when the song didnt happen, Richter said. All of a sudden, boos. I got emails and letters from people saying, Its a right that we have. It didnt take long for the administration to change it. I said, This is a good way to leverage some of the profanity that will happen if you dont play Jump Around. The administration decided to bite the bullet.In the years since, Jump Around has been cemented as a staple, alongside renditions of Sweet Caroline and Build me up Buttercup. It has quickly become considered one of the best traditions in college football, and Saturday will mark the 91st consecutive home game in which Jump Around is played, providing an energy jolt that is difficult to replicate elsewhere.You see other stadiums try to do it, Sondrup said. Theyll play Jump Around, and you kind of laugh. To see the student section embrace it, I think its that energy of Camp Randall. Theyre the ones that took it and ran with it and made it what it is. Its just a great place to play.There is certainly a mystiqueWhen Daniel Einstein overlays sketches of Camp Randall Stadium with the area as it existed 152 years ago, a historical significance surfaces that separates the edifice from every other in college football.There, lining up perfectly in the student section on the fields north side, is where a group of barracks was built for enlisted Union men during the Civil War. The space for the stadiums luxury suites once served as a hillside headquarters for Camp Randall military operations.When the football players are marching down the field, they are following in the footsteps of the military parade ground during the Civil War period, said Einstein, the historic and cultural resources manager at the University of Wisconsin.Most people dont have an awareness of the precise cohabitation of the present activities with the Civil War activities. I wouldnt say that the level of awareness is very high. But there is certainly a mystique.From 1861-65, roughly 70,000 enlisted men came through the complex -- nearly as many people as what fills the stadium on game days now. Camp Randall differed from many Civil War training grounds because it was used temporarily as a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. At the end of April 1862, 1,400 Confederate soldiers, captured at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, were brought back to Camp Randall. The roughly 140 who died in Madison from battlefield injuries are buried at the northernmost Confederate cemetery in the United States.Following the Civil War, the land again became the state fairgrounds. When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant visited the site 15 years later, he called the transformation a symbol of beating the spears of war into the plowshares of peace.In 1893, veterans successfully lobbied to have the land donated to the university as a memorial athletic site. Veterans settled on camp instead of field to preserve the memory of the venue. Football was first played at Camp Randall in 1895, and construction of the current stadium began in 1913. The stadium became fully functional in 1917 and has increased in seating capacity from 10,000 to 80,321. All the while, its connection to the past has endured.A memorial arch was erected and dedicated in 1912 to the Civil War veterans who enlisted from Wisconsin. The arch serves as the entrance to Camp Randall Memorial Park -- a historic site listed on the National Register of Historic Places -- as well as the entrance to Camp Randall Stadium for the schools marching band on football Saturdays.Its not just a park, Einstein said. Its a place where veterans returned. They actually came back for a 75th reunion. This was guys in their 90s coming back to Camp Randall to remember the comrades that died in that Civil War. It was a special place, and we ought to respect it.Thats part of the mystery of the Wisconsin fan ... We get all these people to do crazy thingsDevotion is 40,000 fans braving bitter cold and a three-hour football game to stay for a 20-minute performance from the schools band so they can participate in the largest Chicken Dance youve ever seen. Mike Leckrone has witnessed the madness, known as The Fifth Quarter, up close for decades as Wisconsins band director. Yet explaining the popularity of those postgame shows remains elusive.Thats part of the mystery of the Wisconsin fan, Leckrone said. We get all these people to do crazy things, and theyve done it for years and years. I dont know that theyve ever been able to do anything quite like it anywhere else in the country. People have called me and said, Tell me about this Fifth Quarter.Wisconsin fans are very gregarious, and what we try to do is feed on that and give them some things back that they can pick up on and then have fun with us, too.Leckrone arrived in 1969 to serve as director of the schools marching band and took over as director of the entire band in 1975 -- a role he holds today at age 80. During the early years, the football team inspired little confidence while in the midst of a 20-game winless streak. On-campus protests during the Vietnam War meant few students were interested in wearing a uniform and marching military style. But Leckrone, whose childhood fantasy was to lead a Big Ten band down the field, never wavered in his enthusiasm while leading postgame shows despite minimal interest.Curiosity started to pique during a famous 1978 home football game against Oregon. The band had begun rotating through a series of commercial jingles, including the Budweiser tune, Here Comes the King, with a style imitative of a typical German band. Leckrone seized on the opportunity after fans previously showed great interest in the Beer Barrel Polka. With the help of his band, Leckrone convinced students to change the lyrics from When you say Budweiser, youve said it all, to When you say Wisconsin, youve said it all.During that Oregon game, he played the song on multiple occasions and worked the crowd into a fervor, which coincided with a Wisconsin comeback victory. The song became such a hit that the upper deck of Camp Randall Stadium swayed when it was played, prompting then-athletics director Elroy Hirsch to tell Leckrone not to play the song during games.Instead, Leckrone had the public address speaker make an announcement that it would not be played until five minutes after the game had completed to allow concerned fans to exit, intentionally making a big fuss to spotlight his bands postgame show. The momentum for the song led local sports writer Glenn Miller to dub the performance The Fifth Quarter -- a name that has stuck ever since. The shows became so popular in lean football seasons that Leckrone noted more fans arrived at the end of the game than during.What Mike has done there through the years means a lot to people with the game-day experience, said Lepay, the longtime radio announcer. When you see the band, you see theyre having a good time. Theyre getting involved. The fans see that, they know that, and they like to have a lot of fun with it.Leckrone has continued to find ways to entertain fans over the years, expanding the bands repertoire. He incorporated the Chicken Dance after the schools crew coach, Randy Jablonic, returned from a trip to Europe and suggested Leckrone play it at games. In the 1980s, several of his band members began mimicking Pee Wee Hermans Tequila Dance, and the song quickly found its way into the postgame performance. His biggest failure, he said, was a rendition of the Macarena that students booed because they were fatigued of its popularity in the 1990s.While Leckrone cant fully express why the bands performance has become so important to fans, its role in enhancing the game-day atmosphere has proven to be nearly as vital as the actual game.We have about 20 minutes of solid stuff that is just foolishness in a lot of ways, Leckrone said. 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SPREAD -Pittsburgh 8-5, Cincinnati 4-8-1SERIES RECORD -- Steelers lead 59-35LAST MEETING -- Steelers beat Bengals 24-16, Sept. 18LAST WEEK -- Steelers beat Bills 27-20; Bengals beat Browns 23-10AP PRO32 RANKING -- Steelers No. 8, Bengals No. 21STEELERS OFFENSE -- OVERALL (7), RUSH (9), PASS (8).STEELERS DEFENSE -- OVERALL (11), RUSH (4), PASS (21).BENGALS OFFENSE -- OVERALL (9), RUSH (8), PASS (11).BENGALS DEFENSE -- OVERALL (20), RUSH (25), PASS (12).STREAKS, STATS AND NOTES -- Steelers have won last three at Paul Brown Stadium and six of seven, including 18-16 in opening round of playoffs last January. Penalties on Bengals LB Vontaze Burfict and CB Adam Pacman Jones set up Pittsburghs winning FG in final seconds. ... Burfict and Steelers RB LeVeon Bell missed first meeting this season while suspended by NFL. ... Steelers have won last four games overall, with Bell running for 100 yards in each. ... Bell set club record with 236 yards rushing vs. Bills. Bell had 200 yards from scrimmage for fifth time in career. ... Bell needs 36 yards rushing to pass Rocky Bleier (3,865) for eighth in Steelers history, 114 to pass Barry Foster for seventh, 136 to pass Dick Hoak for sixth, and 160 to pass Frank Pollard and move into fifth place. ... QB Ben Roethliisberger is 21-4 in games in his native Ohio, including 11-2 in Cincinnati and 10-2 in Cleveland.dddddddddddd... Steelers have allowed 16 sacks, second fewest to Oaklands 13. ... WR Antonio Brown needs seven catches for fourth straight season with 100. ... Roethlisberger and Brown have combined for 49 TDs, tied with Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann for most in team history. ... Pittsburgh has held each of last four opponents to 100 yards rushing or less. ... Loss would eliminate Bengals from playoff contention. ...QB Andy Dalton threw career-high 54 passes in earlier game in Pittsburgh for 366 yards; most came late in game. ... Dalton had season-high passer rating of 130 vs. Eagles and 112.2 vs. Browns. ... WR Tyler Boyd leads all rookies with 21 third-down catches. ... DE Carlos Dunlap has 14 passes defensed, tops on team and ninth in NFL. ... DT Geno Atkins has 6+ sacks, fourth most by interior lineman in NFL. ... Bengals switched kickers this week, releasing Mike Nugent and claiming Randy Bullock off waivers from Steelers. ... Fantasy Tip: Since entering NFL in 2013, Bell has 1,418 yards from scrimmage in December, fourth most in league over that span.---For more NFL coverage: http://www.pro32.ap.org and http://www.twitter.com/AP-NFL ' ' '