Stadium Expansion: Will it ever even happen?

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oak_street1981 said:
Lastly, someone needs to let Stanford, Oregon and Miami (and Ok State, Arizona, BC, most ACC teams,NU, know that they can never compete for National Championships, since none of those teams ever draw much more than 50K or so to a game.
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Tubtastic said:
But the Vikes can barely keep the dome full year in and out and pro football is the most popular sport in the nation
3. An expansion would require significant private fundraising by the U. Right now, other significant projects are lined up ahead of any football stadium expansion. The basketball practice facility, baseball stadium, and potential replacement or repair of Williams Arena come to mind. even if the football expansion project leapfrogged the other projects, fundraising will take years and football donors were just recently hit up to build TCF in the first place.
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About the Vikes barely keeping their stadium full- I haven't looked at the statistics of it, but I wouldn't be surprised if competitive BCS schools averaged higher attendance than an average NFL team.

Also, I'm right with you about wanting to get a practice facility and some improvements to the Barn before we even consider a 30k extension.
 

RoyalGopher said:
About the Vikes barely keeping their stadium full- I haven't looked at the statistics of it, but I wouldn't be surprised if competitive BCS schools averaged higher attendance than an average NFL team.

Also, I'm right with you about wanting to get a practice facility and some improvements to the Barn before we even consider a 30k extension.
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I saw somewhere(don't remember where) that the BIG average attendance is 10,000 more per game than the NFL.
 

I wish people would understand that corporate demand for tickets isn't just luxury boxes. A lot of smaller businesses and even some bigger business with a lot of smaller clients use game tickets as a promotional opportunity. The biggest share of this market today, is held by the Vikings, should they move, a good portion of that market would be available to the Gophers. I don't see a full 30,000 seats expansion but 10,000 seats? easily within the first three years.
 

nsmike said:
I wish people would understand that corporate demand for tickets isn't just luxury boxes. A lot of smaller businesses and even some bigger business with a lot of smaller clients use game tickets as a promotional opportunity. The biggest share of this market today, is held by the Vikings, should they move, a good portion of that market would be available to the Gophers. I don't see a full 30,000 seats expansion but 10,000 seats? easily within the first three years.
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Well said.

Face the facts, the U of M along with the 4 pro sports are in the sports entertainment business and they all get a piece of the pie. Individuals have disposable income and businesses have advertising and marketing budgets.

The Vikings are not the sole reason for Gopher football being 'less popular' than we wish but it is a large factor.

Also keep in mind it wasn't too long ago that the Gophers, Twins and Vikings all played at the dome. There were X amount of suites. Now TCF has more suites, Target Field has many more suites and a new Vike stadium(if and when they build it) will have a ton more suites. I've seen the numbers but I don't remember them and I don't feel like looking them up right now, but the # of additional suites is staggering.

Like it or not there's only so much money to go around.

If the Vikings move can we get Ramsey County to pay for the expansion.;)
 

oak_street1981 said:
Also, when you walk by the stadium, it just looks like its missing a top level. It's just so short compared to other stadiums, almost like someone just sliced off the third level or it.
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Well for starters, the stadium is built more above ground than almost all other stadiums, so in reality it looks very tall from the outside relative to other stadiums, when walking by it. It is not half below ground like Kinnick, Michigan Stadium, or the USC Coliseum, so your perspective on TCF looking short is total BS. The home side, with the tall suite levels, looks like giant ocean liner when lit up at night.

What other stadiums have you "walked by"?

Secondly, are you suggesting that HOK (now called something else) is incompetent when it created the plans?

Putting 30K in seats between the end of the press level at the SE end of the stadium and the NW corner by the scoreboard is easy. As a big fan, apparently you never bothered to walk around the top level open concourse and look at all othe open space between the fence and the wall of the stadium.

Lastly, someone needs to let Stanford, Oregon and Miami (and Ok State, Arizona, BC, most ACC teams,NU, know that they can never compete for National Championships, since none of those teams ever draw much more than 50K or so to a game.
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How in any way did I say that they were incompetent? If anything, it looks like they are still building the stadium, just the 3rd level is being added later. And to answer your question, I have walked by a total of 2 college stadiums, but that doesn't somehow make my opinion invalid. And I'm pretty sure stadium like the Horseshoe or Beaver Stadium are MUCH taller from the outside. But this is beside the main point anyway, it was just a small comment that I threw in at the end of my paragraph.

As far as the list of teams you provided, the only one that really draws around 50,000 to a game and still competes year-in and year-out is Oregon. I wouldn't say Stanford is quite that good yet, Miami has 75,000 seats, Ok State is kind of a contender, Arizona sucks, and NU has 80,000 seats.
 


Stadium Expansion: Will it ever even happen?


Maybe.
 

Nope. It will never happen. I suggest you start a new thread asking when they will start covering 15 rows of the upper deck with 'Go Gophers' tarps.
 

tato2001 said:
Nope. It will never happen. I suggest you start a new thread asking when they will start covering 15 rows of the upper deck with 'Go Gophers' tarps.
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actually, I'm starting to think "Beating FCS Teams: Will it ever even happen?" is a better thread
 

Okie boy, the Miami football progam has had pathetic attendence for years, at the Orange Bowl and at the former Joe Robbie Stadium.

Arizona, BC, Wake Forest, Georga Tech, OK State, Kansas State, Illinois, Stanford, Cal, UCLA, Northwestern, Purdue, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Colorado, Texas Tech, and more schools than I can remember have had large degrees of success, or a couple of big years in a row with average attendance below 50K or not much more for years.


The U of M could bump capacity to 60K in about two weeks without doing a whole lot of anything. The quality of the seating would not be to the level of the HOK original design, but it would be better then 60 percent of the end zone seats at Nebraska, and equally comfortable to the sardine like painted on the bench spots at Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and OSU.

If they merely repainted the bench seats and packed the rows tighter in the non chair areas and added some risers in the closed end, they could add all the seats I proposed. It would suck, so I'd stick with the new third tier above, when the demand calls for it.
 



Couple of points here:

The average NFL stadium is smaller as well, because they want scarcity of tickets to keep prices high. While college football is big business, it's not the for-profit juggernaut of the NFL. In addition, too large a stadium for the NFL means likely blackouts, even in large markets. Look at the Raiders and Rams when they played in the Coliseum, the Lions at the Silverdome, or the Browns when they played at Municipal. Blackouts are bad business for a league that relies heavily on massive TV contracts.

Even when they were national powers, Miami and Pitt didn't draw well. Much like the Gophers at the dome, they were playing off-campus in NFL stadiums in large urban areas where the NFL was king. In the case of Miami, they're also a relatively small private college without a huge alumni base of say, a Penn State, Michigan or OSU.

And I really hope they never tear down the Barn. While it could use a renovation, it would be a travesty to tear down that building. It's one of the truly special things about the U campus. One of the really stupid things they did was build Ridder Arena. A full hockey arena for a non-revenue sport that nobody will ever care about makes no sense whatsoever. There are enough ice surfaces in the Twin Cities that the womens hockey team could have played on.
 

GopherVotary said:
Unless we can schedule Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska at home every year, it would be a waste of money.
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This.

Until we start stringing together multiple good seasons, the only reason we could sell expanding the Bank is to give more Husker and Badger fans a chance to see their team on the road.
 

I'm glad that someone brought this topic up. I'm starting to believe that Minnesota has an uphill battle; not just because of the product on the field, but also because geographically the Gophers are in a very challenging spot. When you think about it, there is no team in the B1G that is in a city as big as Minneapolis. Even when you look further into it, there are hardly any successful programs (besides Miami, Pitt, TCU, etc)in the nation that reside in the middle of a major populated area. Madison is all about the Badgers; Lincoln is all about Big Red, Iowa City is all Hawkeyes.. The list goes on and on. Is it merely a coincidence that the Vikings arrived in the mid-60's and at that same time Gopher fans were witnessing the end of an era of domination. The Gopher's program not only has to compete on the field, but they also have to compete for fans. Am I out in left field about this or do fans agree?
 





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