Ann Arbor — The first night game at Michigan Stadium on Saturday against Notre Dame has been the highest-demand ticket ever at Michigan, and athletic director Dave Brandon said an additional 50,000 tickets could have been sold.

Michigan plays Notre Dame in the 39th meeting of the rivals Saturday at 8 p.m., in a prime-time nationally-televised game with ESPN's GameDay crew in Ann Arbor. Brandon said Tuesday during a news conference that it will be the largest crowd in Michigan Stadium history. There are 109,901 seats.

Michigan Stadium's largest crowd was 113,090 for the 2010 season-opener against Connecticut.

"I always hate to say ever, but in modern times, based on … all the records we have, this would be the highest-demand ticket ever," Brandon said. "We could easily sell another 25,000 or 50,000 tickets to this game. The supply-and-demand model is getting blown up here.

"This place is going to be jammed. It will be the largest crowd we've ever had."

Brandon addressed logistics and security issues for Saturday's game, but also discussed problems experienced with the new Michigan Stadium scoreboards last weekend in their debut, the potential for additional night games and whether Michigan would entertain rival Ohio State for a night game, and also a special ceremony for former U-M receiver and Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard.

Howard, a member of the GameDay crew, will be honored during the game for his recent induction into the College Football Hall of Fame. But Brandon said not to expect Howard's jersey No. 21 to be retired.

"We're going to recognize Desmond, and you stay tuned for how that's going to happen," Brandon said. "The retirement-of-jersey situation is one we've been pretty public about in terms of having some serious difficulties and limitations. So I would not look forward to that, but I'd look forward to other things."

If the first night game goes well, Brandon said Michigan fans should anticipate additional night games at Michigan Stadium. They will not be limited to non-conference opponents, but the preference — if a Big Ten opponent is to be considered — would be an early October game.

"I would like to do one night game a year if it goes well," Brandon said. "If it doesn't go well, it doesn't matter what I'd like to do. It would have to be right team, right situation. I would never commit myself to every year, but if we could get into that kind of rhythm, that would be terrific. Clearly the acceptance level of this game is beyond anything we've seen."

Michigan is playing at Northwestern on Oct. 8 in a night game this season.

Earlier this summer, Brandon and Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis were asked about staging a Michigan-MSU night game, and Brandon shot that down idea. He also dismissed the possibility of hosting Ohio State in a night game the last Saturday of November.

"It's totally out of the question," Brandon said.

During Michigan's opener last Saturday against Western Michigan, which was lightning-shortened with 1:27 left in the third quarter, there were a number of complaints about the two new HD scoreboards at Michigan Stadium, an issue Brandon briefly touched on in a Twitter posting last weekend.

The biggest problem? The boards did not show the yard line on which the ball was marked.

"We've got people working on that; we were working on that over the weekend," Brandon said. "It was new technology.

"And so people were looking up there, 'I'm used to seeing this' and 'I want this information.' The wonderful thing about these scoreboards is how easy we can modify and change and we're in the process of doing that. We need to have, in a stadium as large as ours particularly — people want to know what yard line is the ball on because in some cases it's not easy to tell based on where you're seated. Cleary we're going to fix that. People want to be able to see down and distance and some of that data a little easier; we're going to make that bigger.

"People want more running game stats. We knew that. We have a separate computer program that creates game stats and displays them; that went down on us. That was a de-bugging issue, and we finally got it fixed, but by then we had other (weather-related) problems to deal with.

"We're going to show more game stats and make sure people have that information, and we also heard that people want more scores from around the country. We'll get better and we'll learn from some of our experience and feedback."

http://www.detnews.com/article/20110906/SPORTS0201/109060392/1361/Michigan-works-on-scoreboard-bugs--girds-for-biggest-crowd-ever