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.
That soccer vibe particularly 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 the 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 resemble a wall of fans on top of the field.
All around, though, 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 inside feels like a self-contained futuristic sporting world of its own.
It’s especially surreal that Northwestern will now 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 its tall western and stumpy eastern stands — the stadium’s visible-on-TV features — were somehow more flattering than the dim, dirty maze of hallways underneath the stadium that fans in person traversed.
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 during the 1920s and early 1930s and didn’t yet differ greatly in size from its peers, so Rogers’ early blueprints envisioned one of the first-ever triple-decker stadiums — following the world’s first, Yankee Stadium, by only three years.
Financial constraints and realism eventually triumphed over those ambitions, and Northwestern ultimately didn’t follow Notre Dame and USC into the modern-day tier of private-school blue bloods. Would an enormous stadium have changed that course? Who knows.
It’s fitting, albeit probably coincidental, that the new Ryan Field does feature three decks. They create an optical illusion which makes the stadium seem larger than it actually is.
That’s because each deck is relatively shallow. There’s a lot of structure; there aren’t a lot of seats. Behind the northern end zone, for example, the first deck contains only 12 rows of seats and the second deck only three rows.
Capacity has been reduced by more than 12,000 from the old stadium, making new Ryan Field the smallest in the Big Ten and the second-smallest in the power conferences.
That’s a smart move for Northwestern considering its small, geographically dispersed and not exactly sports-obsessed alumni base. That “small” adjective cannot be emphasized enough: Northwestern’s annual graduating class is less than half the size of the second-smallest Big Ten school, Nebraska.
The idea is that smaller capacity equates to a higher percentage of seats being occupied by devoted season-ticket holders, limiting opportunities for larger fan bases to take over the stadium like they used to.
Considering Northwestern hasn’t even consistently packed its 15,000-seat temporary lakefront stadium the last two seasons, there’s no guarantee that effort will pay off. Realistically, attendance is likely an eternal challenge for the school.
But at least Northwestern now has a stadium that will actively attract fans instead of deter them.
