From the Editorial Board: 'Those with no love for purple will snicker that this small capacity is a not-so-tacit self-acknowledgement of the limited appeal of Northwestern football, even in the decades to come.'
Northwestern University released renderings of the proposed design for a new football stadium, a replacement for the 97-year-old Ryan Field.
The second — equally striking — is that the stadium actually will have some 12,000 fewer seats. Instead of the current capacity of 47,130, the new Ryan Field will only seat about 35,000.When did you last hear of a new stadium project designed to reduce capacity by some 25%? We can’t recall, either. In all those cases, the work was about renovation, but also about adding capacity and increasing the potential gross ticket sales.
Those with no love for purple will snicker that this small capacity is a not-so-tacit self-acknowledgement of the limited appeal of Northwestern football, even in the decades to come. Unlike many of its Big Ten rivals, Northwestern rarely sells out and on the rare occasions when it does, the capacity crowd usually comes courtesy of the Chicago-based fans of the visiting team.