Not to get ahead of ourselves but...

[Schnauzer]

Yes, from everything I have heard the seating capacity can be raised by smaller amounts. It doesn't have to jump all the way to 80K in one jump.

 

[SMU GOPHS FAN]

Vikings leaving town.

 

[GoAUpher]

personally, I think they should've built the stadium to seat about 58,000 just like Memorial Stadium and left it at that, but that's just my opinion. I wonder if there are plans that would allow them to expand Little by little, instead of jumping all the way to 80,000, which i think is a little far fetched. I'd love to see only about 8,000 more seats added in about 5 yrs.

I think that would have been nice if there was the demand for it. Unfortunately too many of the additional waitlist seats would have been ticket brokers and the # of rival fans in the seats would be larger as result. Also, it seems to me that the open seating configuration pretty much capped the seating where it is. To get the extra seats you would have to have closed off part of the open end or enlarged the footprint of the stadium to include more rows in the upper deck.

 

[Yah-E]

What is the timeline that we are looking at for the expansion up to 80,000 seats? What will it take?

10 years?
Big Ten title?
Both?

I don't know if we'll see an expansion anytime soon! But lets look at both scenarios:

NOT EXPANDING: Many thing has to happen as mentioned by previous posters to even put the topic on the University's agenda. I live in Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Steelers season tickets are in HUGE demand and you're on the waiting list for DECADES even GENERATIONS. The stadium had been sold out since 1972!! Do we hear about Heinz Field expansion? NO!

Coincidentally, the Heinz Field is also build by HOK Sports (the same Architechs) that is building our TCF, the seating capacity at Heinz is only 62,500. Shoot, if a football team has won multiple Superbowls and has a waiting list since 1972 don't expand their stadium, our Gophers has to do HECK OF A WHOLE LOTS and gain another 300K true died hard fans to get that additional 30K new seats!!?

EXPANDING: Well, we can look at it this way, the stadium is dry, the athletic department is loosing $$, maybe they'll consider to expand to sell more tickets to visitor teams because the visitors will have a higher demand then our own Gopher fans. This scenario will need a good healthy size waiting list to happen of course!

I'm going to lean toward, we won't expand our stadium until at least 2050!

 

[Cmich Gopher]

I'll go with a minimum 10 years of high level competition(regular of the top 3 or 4 in the big ten) and a couple conference titles. That gives time for several graduating classes to go to the U of M when the level of play was high.... So in other words maybe never but I remain hopefull.

Im good with whatever it takes to keep a great atmosphere, which we can certainly have at 50k.