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cincibuck
You kids stay off my lawn!
Northwestern reveals plans for new $850 million Ryan Field
When Northwestern opens the new Ryan Field in 2026, it will not only be the largest stadium project in college football history, with a price tag of $850 million, but possibly a model for future stadium designs around the sport.www.espn.com
Northwestern reveals plans for new $850 million Ryan Field
When Northwestern opens the new Ryan Field in 2026, it will not only be the largest stadium project in college football history, with a price tag of $850 million, but possibly a model for future stadium designs around the sport.
Plans for the privately funded stadium, supported mostly by the Ryan family, were revealed Monday and shared with ESPN. The new Ryan Field has elements from recently constructed NFL stadiums as well as soccer facilities in MLS and the English Premier League. The stadium will have the Big Ten's smallest capacity at 35,000, but emphasizes the experience for each spectator, which includes sightlines much closer to the field than traditional bowled stadiums, because of structural steel in the base of the stadium.
"Our worst seat in this stadium is 100 feet closer to the field than the most expensive seat at the Big House," .........said Pat Ryan Jr., co-CEO of Ryan Sports Development, referring to 107,601-seat Michigan Stadium. "You're building things up and cantilevering them over instead of going out. It's structurally much more challenging from an engineering perspective, but you've got to create better-than-TV sightlines."
Ryan, whose family is a minority owner of the Chicago Bears and has a stake in the EPL club AFC Bournemouth, surveyed multiple recent professional facilities during the design process. The new Ryan Field will feature a canopy that covers the entire seating area but not the playing field, and is designed to maximize sound. Northwestern's student section will be positioned and designed more like a supporters' section at top soccer stadiums.
Lower.com Field, which opened in 2021 as the new home for the MLS' Columbus Crew, was the "most influential," Ryan said, in shaping the design.
"A lot of people look at first-of-its-kind and say, 'Oh, it's just a mini NFL stadium,' but it's really something specific for college," Ryan said. "Every college we've seen has said, 'We know we need to think about doing something like this, but somebody needed to go first.' Everybody else is saying, 'We're going to watch closely, and if it works, we'll come see it.'"
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Looks like they’re going for the high end happy hour folks.
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OHSportsFan
Fan of Ohio Sports in Indy
Chip Kelly? They sold him on nice lake front property in Evanston?
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Crump's brother
Moxahala Park Carnie/ Rehoboth Strangler
They may never lose to Ped State again!
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ScriptOhio
Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
New Ryan Field gives Northwestern a spectacular football venue 100 years in the making
A century after considering building one of the nation's biggest stadiums, the Wildcats have instead built possibly one of the nation's best.
chicago.suntimes.com
New Ryan Field gives Northwestern a spectacular football venue 100 years in the making
A century after considering building one of the nation’s biggest stadiums, the Wildcats have instead built possibly one of the nation’s best.
In 1925, Northwestern briefly dreamed of building one of the largest stadiums in the nation, then did nothing of the sort.
A century later, Northwestern identified a different superlative target for its new stadium. This time, the university might have achieved it.
“I truly believe it’s the best stadium in all of football,” Wildcats coach David Braun said Tuesday. “We’re not trying to be the biggest. We delivered on being the best.”
Construction is progressing rapidly on the new Ryan Field, scheduled to open Oct. 2 vs. Penn State, and it’s revealing a spectacular — and extremely purple — facility that evokes an English Premier League venue more than a Big Ten stadium.
The soccer vibe stems from two elements. One is a 360-degree roof designed to shield all 35,000 seats from weather and to amplify crowd noise, which Northwestern hasn’t exactly been known for in the past.
The other is a standing-room-only student section behind the southern end zone, which rises steeply enough to require horizontal railings between each row. When populated, it should appear as a wall of fans on top of the field.
All around, it’s a beautiful facility, one that looks starkly out of place across the street from humble three-story brick apartment buildings in Evanston — but feels on the inside like a self-contained futuristic sporting world.
It’s especially surreal that Northwestern will call this facility home, given the nature of old Ryan Field.
There was a certain charm to that dump, but it was a dump. The rusty metal bleachers, crumbling white concrete and jarring asymmetry between the tall western stands and the stumpy eastern stands — the features most visible on TV — were somehow more attractive than the dim, dirty maze of hallways that fans walked through underneath the stadium.
But it’s perhaps less surreal with historical context. James Rogers, the old stadium’s architect, initially imagined it as a behemoth in the mold of Michigan Stadium, which was built around the same time.
Northwestern was a national title contender in football in the 1920s and early 1930s, not yet differing greatly in size from its peers, so early blueprints depicted what would have been one of the world’s first triple-decker stadiums, following the first, Yankee Stadium, by only three years.
Financial constraints and realism eventually triumphed, and NU ultimately didn’t follow Notre Dame and USC into the modern-day tier of private-school bluebloods. Would an enormous stadium have changed that course? Who knows.
The new Ryan Field does feature three decks, creating an optical illusion that makes the stadium seem larger than it is.
That’s because each deck is relatively shallow. There’s a lot of structure but not a lot of seats. Behind the northern end zone, for example, the first deck contains only 12 rows and the second deck only three.
Capacity has been reduced by more than 12,000 from the old stadium, making this one the smallest in the Big Ten and the second-smallest in the power conferences.
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