Northwestern Wildcats building a new stadium.
- Thread starter 12375CAT
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Why? Why go the clickbait route? You know you don’t win a prize for thread views right?
I've been in their football facilities building and it is state of the art. Full indoor football field right on the lake with lake views. I'm not going to lie it is pretty awesome. I don't understand them throwing this much money into sports complexes if they don't lower their admissions requirements for athletes.
If it's all privately funded, go for it...and I think a lot of the focus will be on other events they can host there. Timing isn't great for the program coming off a 3-9/1-8 season and starting this season 1-4 with losses to Southern Illinois and Miami (OH).
35,000 capacity will make it the 3rd smallest in the P5 with Wake and Washington State below it.
Patrick Ryan is basically Northwestern's Phil Knight - he alone gave $480M towards this stadium. I live in the area, his family has donated obscene amounts of money to better their academic and athletic facilities. Perks of starting your own insurance company.
I'm not sure if it makes any sense whatsoever to spend that kind of money to build a 35,000 seat stadium. Obviously, NW football is not a big draw in Chicago and, if the current facilities are pretty good, why spend that much on an incremental improvement? If the consolidation of CFB continues and a 'super conference' or similar arrangement is agreed upon, I wouldn't think teams like NW, Vandy, Rutgers, Purdue (perhaps), Colorado, Illinois (perhaps), UVa (perhaps) would make the cut. They can't (and haven't shown the desire to) compete against the schools that are all in on competing in the new NIL ear of CFB.
They’re going to use it for other events like concerts ect: not just for Football.
He's definitely been throwing the money around, I just don't understand why. It's not like Northwestern is going to be able to bring in top football talent, the admission standards are too high to bring in a lot of 4/5* type players. Lower the admissions standards for players and then they might be on to something, otherwise this is just lipstick on a pig. Maybe I'm missing something?
We will see more programs than this lowering their capacity. Mitch got that right. Football will televise great with only 35,000 fans in a 35,000 seat stadium. 35,000 fans in a 70,000 seat stadium does not make for great television.
I agree that we did the right thing in making Commonwealth a much better game day experience, choosing that over capacity. 35,000 is really small though. A 26% seating reduction to an already smaller stadium just surprised me.
One thing many don't know about Northwestern is that it's the only stadium in FBS that does not have lighting. That will be an improvement in itself.
He's a billionaire building a monument to himself. That's pretty much it.
