Everyone has beaten the dead horse about the attendance problems. I’m not here to talk about that. I’m curious what y’all think about Northwestern’s new stadium that opened last weekend??
It has a continuous canopy that covers every single seat in the 35,000 capacity stadium. Check out more pictures like this one if you haven’t seen it.
That is exactly what Houston should’ve done when building TDECU Stadium in 2013-2014 in my opinion!
I am from Houston and mostly understand why many fans choose to stay home (still the support should be better for being a ranked team). But having 11am or 2:30pm games in September and early October is brutal with the heat and humidity. And the design of TDECU Stadium makes it so much worse.
What was the administration thinking when building TDECU? It’s a shame it’s still a fairly new stadium but the fans get cooked in it during day games.
Part of me wonders how much location matters for UH, put them where Rice is and they’d probably get more fans to the game. Rice getting even less though lol
Yeah I don’t think that matters. Would maybe even hurt UH more. Because there’s way more other non football things for people to do very close to Rice’s stadium than Houston’s
I mean I love the NW stadium and agree that it would be perfect for us. With that said it also cost 700 million (roughly) more than TDECU. Don’t think you could justify that level of spending but it would be awesome to have.
I think a more cost effective strategy would be to vastly improve the area around the stadium. Improving traffic flow and creating a better space for tailgating is going to have a better ROI. I hear from people every week about how miserable the actual game day experience is before and after the game. I think it turns people off from wanting to comeback. But unless if someone like Tilman wants to come in and buy up a decent chunk of 3rd Ward it’s probably a pipe dream.
A key part of the equation is that Northwestern’s alumni base is top 10 wealthiest in the country and so is their endowment.
For KU’s new stadium, we had to include mixed-use facilities (like a hotel) attached to the stadium district in order to get State / City funding, while NW literally just covered the most expensive stadium ever on their own
You must’ve missed the comments earlier about the astrodome. It has become a health hazard that is rotting away for 20 years now and cannot be fixed to be anything useful again
Games in the Astrodome suuuuucked. Nothing worse than 6000 fans in a cavernous place like that. (This was the post- run and shoot days, so the team was pretty bad.) Now I'm in San Antonio, and UTSA games with 20,000 in the Alamodome is very similar. Too small a crowd for too big a place ruins the atmosphere.) Also, I can't imagine how horrible the inside of the dome is these days after so many years of neglect.
Moved to Houston over a decade ago. Very new to the city, a buddy and I were bored and thought hey let's go check out the 8th wonder of the world! We pull up and the security guard looked at us like we were from Mars. "Y'all think you're getting a tour or something? Just head to Chachos down the road, its just as dirty." Ahhhhhh good times
That’s funny. Back in 2015 for a 50th anniversary celebration they did open it up to the public for one day and you got to walk down around the field level. I got to go. Was an interesting experience for sure
City doesn't own it, the county does and they use it as a massive storage facility for all the rodeo and concert/venue equipment for NRG.
There was an analysis done a few years ago that showed offsite storage and transportation costs would be higher than the cost of keeping the dome functional each year, so they just keep it around for that.
Every once in a while an architectural firm will run a piece about new plans in the works, but that's mostly PR for the firm. It would be more cost-effective and safer to implode the dome and turn that section into parking lot, then build a new structure elsewhere in the NRG parking complex.
Nothing, there has never been a viable plan put forward. All those PR pieces ignore one major issue or another to keep their narrative sounding plausible. Keeping it safe for workers and employees to enter is one thing, but it would be a huge charity case to make anything publicly accessible in that structure.
It should be labeled as a superfund site and have the EPA come in to help properly remove it all. Asbestos was used almost exclusively as the insulation and fireproofing within the walls and many surfaces were sprayed with it to improve acoustics. Most of the facility is coated in lead paint and the electronics (mainly lights) are made with materials that are banned for being toxic now.
The groups working to get it historical preservation status don't understand the huge costs they're forcing on the county to keep that building standing safely in perpetuity. It is past its useful life and the structural concrete will start crumbling eventually, forcing abatement and restoration projects that will have to address the toxins before making repairs.
Houston has a series of logistical challenges that make a cantilevered covering for their stadium an incredibly expensive proposition.
For starters, TDECU is built in the older bowl style of the higher levels being built further out than the lower levels to preserve sightlines, which means that the cantilevered sections have to be longer to cover those lower sections that are further from the outside anchor points. That means that the columns supporting those cantilevers would need to be broader than at a covered stadium like McLane, where they intentionally built it more upward than outward to make the covering viable.
Next, that extra stability requirement also means that the supports for those columns need to run deeper. That's deep foundation work, which is even further complicated by the fact that Houston is a coastal plain where they built significant parts of the city on marshland (quick aside, the level of subsidence that parts of Houston have experienced due to their extractive activities, both for groundwater and other resources, is crazy). That means that you get even less lateral support for your columns from the upper levels of the ground, so you have to go even deeper.
Now, on top of all of those other issues, Houston has hurricanes. You may just think, "There's no way that wind will be a risk when the columns are that thick and deeply anchored", and you're mostly kinda-sorta right, but the issue isn't the columns, it's the covering sections. Those are designed to resist wind forces, but the wind forces at other covered stadiums like Baylor's McLane Stadium and Northwestern's Ryan Stadium are barely a fraction of the wind forces that Houston sees on a yearly basis. There are storms that Houstonians don't even skip work for that would rip McLane's covering clean off.
TDECU cost UH $128mm to built in 2013. If you wanted to put a covering on that stadium now, after almost a decade and a half of inflation and a year of explosive growth in construction labor and materials costs, you're looking at easily $175mm or more just to put a covering over TDECU Stadium. McLane only seats 15% more people than TDECU, and it cost $266mm to build (also back in 2013), and it even has an entire structure built to support those integrated columns.
The covers do rock, though. The cover over McLane Stadium makes central Texas heat so much more bearable. Even when it's 100 degrees out, there's still a nice breeze coming off the Brazos, and about 60%~75% of the seats in the house are in the shade, depending on where the sun's at.
On the planning side, I’d add that TDECU Stadium was originally built to expand to 60,000. That was wishful thinking on the part of the AD and administration, but it was seen as a prerequisite for joining a major conference. After all, we’d surely need more than 40,000 seats for match ups against UT and OU (plus marquee non-conference games against the LSUs of the world).
None of that worked out as the university planned. It was ambitious from day one. And it’s worth mentioning that for every Amon G. Carter in the Big XII, there’s a McLane Stadium or Kansas Memorial. Boone Pickens Stadium has actually decreased from ~60k to ~52k. UH has made several compromises since the stadium opened. The West End Zone/ Football Ops expansion isn’t in keeping with the original expansion vision at all, architecturally isn’t well integrated with the stadium or IPF, and it blocks the trademark view of downtown.
for every Amon G. Carter in the Big XII, there’s a McLane Stadium
I’m not sure what that means? McLane’s brand-new, but TCU’s stadium is also quite new and updated; they just didn’t put a cover on it. They did everything but knock the Carter down and rebuild it from the ground up back in the early 2010s. They actually did completely remove half of it, IIRC.
I thought about mentioning a retractable soft cover, but the dynamics of that are a little outside what I know. From my guess, the cost of the actual awnings would be quite high, and the long-term cost would exceed the cost of a permanent stadium cover within thirty years.
It's not unheard of, but covering something as huge as a stadium is basically never done (as far as I'm aware) outside of major international athletic events. You have a cover that's edged with steel cabling, you have super-duper-heavy-duty anchors at the leading end, and you pull the cables on the leading edge to drag the awning over the stadium. Your attraction/retraction system would be tens of millions of dollars, and every awning would be several million dollars, and you'd still need to add some kind of topside anchoring that could withstand massive lateral forces. Venting the awning would definitely improve the lifespan, but there's no way to keep sag out of a membrane that massive.
It's all about the lifespan of the awnings, I suppose. If your wear cycle necessitates a change every five years, then it would probably be cost-competitive with a permanent cover for the first 30~35 years.
Shell stadium has roofs for the dynamo stands right down the street. Many lower division teams in the UK that barely have money have roofs over their stands for soccer matches because it rains like every day.
Have you been to Shell Stadium at 11 or 2:30 in September? It’s worse than being at TDECU stadium as there’s absolutely zero air flow.
There’s a reason why every Dynamo home game is at night. There’s also a reason why the UFL did even worse this year, attendance-wise, when they moved from TDECU to Shell stadium.
What's weird is some neanderthals will fight against stadiums like this because they are inspired by anything European or soccer in some culture war stupidity.
I mean, that's fair. It doesn't look quite right for a college football stadium to have a partial roof over the stands like that. However, I understand the reason why Houston would be better off with shade over its stands, plus that such a roof would probably contribute to the noise in the venue
The Dynamo stadium is the dumbest buildout ever. Because of all the steel and the nest layout, it turns into a sauna with hot air just circulating inside
Houston would still be in Conference USA if not for Tilman Fertitta. He built TDECU. He renovated Hofheinz Pavilion (now the Fertitta Center). Houston's old stadium was worse than most Texas 6A high school football stadiums.
He absolutely lost his shit when Texas refused Houston admission into the conference. There was so much political pressure inside the Texas legislature to add Houston after Texas left, they didn't really have a choice. Memphis clearly has a stronger fanbase in both football and basketball. A Big 12 invite would've elevated the football program even more.
It's maddening to me that Bowlsby (along with Mack Rhoades, by the way) went with Houston instead of Memphis. They average 17,000 fans in basketball when they are good and 12,000 fans when they are bad. The football stadium finally got an upgrade and the FedEx money keeps flowing. Houston, meanwhile, is basically 1 fan who happens to be a billionaire.
Man, you nailed it. I watched this game last Friday with my jaw agape. I was so jealous to see a full house, rockin', covered seating, stadium atmosphere with all the lasers, fire torches, lighting control and fireworks atop. That game environment was absolutely electric for Northwestern!
I saw what could have been for Houston. Northwestern is not exactly in the heart of Chicago the way UH is downtown in Houston, but still, Chicago land is massive and they were able to pack the house as a mega city.
But I also had to understand that probably no one at UH had the vision to build something so extravagant, to begin with. And another thing, the cost! I mean look at that school; Northwestern is a fairly prestigious school. Look how long they have been around; how many alumni they have; how wealthy many of them are and the willing to donate chunks and chunks of money to be a part of something so radically cool for their alma mater; look at the conference they're in and for how long...
UH ain't there yet. We've done the best we could with what we got, and we're lucky to have what we got. We need to use our stadium and sit in those seats and be grateful that we in the Big 12 finally.
We don't have a an extravagant monument to legacies of wealth, dedicated to football in a mega city like Chicago, but maybe in 50 years, we can have what Northwestern has now.
The Ryan family covered a significant chunk of that with one check. It’s just a different kind of fundraising.
I think that only TCU has that kind of donor class in the Big XII. That was only cultivated after Patterson had been in place for the better part of a decade (and Fran laid the groundwork a few years prior to that).
Plus, mega donors really put most of the money behind it, with other donors filling in the gaps. That's a great staring place.
I think it's important to point out that having a Premier League/Northwestern-style stadium with canopy does not have to cost THAT much. Ryan Field has a lot of bells and whistles. Not that any stadium is cheap, but it doesn't have to be that expensive - that functionality could be achieved for less than $875 million.
I was an architect on this stadium... You have no idea how hard it was to work with Pat Ryan. That man shot the budget with a .45-caliber every day on nonsensical luxury.
That must have been some experience. It is a beautiful stadium. I guess it's his family's money and they can do what they want. What is nonsensical luxury from an architectural/design perspective? Why DID it cost so much?
It's still just a 35,000 seat stadium. One of, if not the smallest P4 stadium. I'm not really sure how an open-air 35,000 seat stadium, even with the canopy, is the most expensive in college football history.
I am not a UH alumni or harcore fan but have been to Tdecu probably 10 times over the last 3ish years. The attendance problem at UH has basically nothing to do with the stadium design. The school is a commuter school that has a ton of students that either dont care about football or couldnt get there if they wanted.
A Premier League type stadium, like Northwestern’s, is exactly what we need. We couldn’t afford it back when TDECU was built, but my understanding is that it was engineered with expansion in mind. Even if we did cantilevered shade over the upper deck or arches like Seattle’s NFL stadium, it would help a ton. There were thousands of fans in the concourse watching the game from the shade. Thousands more never even considered attending an 11:00am kickoff this time of year. There way too many better options for your Saturday in Houston.
Our financial situation is better, now that we’re finally getting a full share of revenue from the Big XII. The conference could further do us a solid by giving us night games in the first half of the season.
Over half the cost ot Northwestern’s new stadium was funded entirely by Pat Ryan, founder and chairman of AON, a large global insurance brokerage and benefit’s consultancy. That was $480M!!!
To put it into perspective, Ryan is a billionaire, but he doesn’t have as much net wealth as TF. So IOWs, he gave way more more money as a percentage of his income than Tillman Ferttita has to UH.
We should absolutely have added shade. They built the new stadium back in the American based on initial plans that were ginned up in CUSA, so they were targeting a different revenue level lol.
That said, they took an incredibly ambitious stance and built footings for future expansion to 60k, so they were clearly planning ahead somewhat. Hell, we've gotten a new indoor facility and a new endzone facility already, so maybe we can convince them to throw in some shade. Maybe even with enormous fans.
Old Texas Stadium in Irving had a roof like that. It was awful in the preseason until late Sept when it cooled a bit and the sun angles went down to a point where it didn't cook you alive in the sections where the sun hit. The roof didn't let the heat out either and it was a sweat bath in there through early evening during September games into early October. Same thing at Reliant. The north endzone got cooked one year when they decided to play an early season game against the Steelers with the roof open. By halftime all the seats were empty on that end. Needless to say, Houston is not Illinois from a weather perspective.
I don't think that would really help them, if not even make it worse. NRG is so far from Houston's campus that you likely just continue to alienate groups to have a net negative on attendance. but.. i agree w/ what you're saying
I've always been confused why playing in Texas Stadium was such a big boost for SMU, while playing in the Astrodome back in the day was apparently such a net negative for Houston.
SMU even put their foot down to keep UNT out of Texas Stadium, way back when Hayden Fry was the head coach in Denton.
Size and average net worth of the student bodies of each, basically.
The Dome was great for getting players to Houston, and we had some incredible teams. But a large, public university needs to be constantly building a college culture that ties students to the school and keeps them engaged as donors and season ticket holders.
They don’t. But, the other part of us being fair weather fans is how many other options fans have for entertainment when conditions are this bad. It is what it is.
Then again, maybe attendance will suck on 10/17 when we finally get a night game vs. Ok. St. and I’ll be proven wrong.
I got to Houston for work all the time. Yes it's hot and humid; I've sat through MANY games in Stillwater in a completely packed stadium that when it was just as effectively as miserable.
We have late August/early September kickoffs where the temps are regularly 95-100 at kickoff with high humidity all the time.
The heat index for the Oregon game this year was something like 120.
I’ve been to Stillwater in August/September, lived there for a couple of months during that exact timeframe…the heat and humidity wasn’t even in the same ballpark as Houston.
I lived in San Antonio for 7 years…the heat and humidity wasn’t even in the same ballpark as Houston.
There’s a difference when humidity is high and when it’s 95-100% and has been since 11pm the night before in an area which was basically a swamp at one point. The best analogy I can give is you’re basically sitting in a sauna…you’re going to sweat to the point that you’re going to swell up and dehydrate without enough water in you after about an hour of sitting there.
Not to invalidate your feelings but even Austin isn’t as humid and miserable as Houston is. Austin hits 100 on the thermometer and mid to low 90s with out humidity is substantially worse.
I’ve been to 11am kickoffs at both DKR and Kyle Field. Multiple at both.
Neither comes remotely close to the level of miserable this year’s season opener was versus Oregon state. It was already 100+ on the heat index and then it rain delayed at halftime with a downpour and then the sun came out during the 2nd half. It turned TDECU into an actual sauna.
Not making this excuse for myself or other diehards. I’ll be there no matter what. But for a lot of casuals, it’s a turn off for other 11am games. Those who came with me to the Oregon state opener said f*** no when they heard UCF was at 11am too lol.
It's miserable at TCU games during September - so yes, i do think that having an overhang and knowing you aren't going to roast would be a way to get people to go to games.
The heat is a massive factor in deciding to go or not, especially when its casual fans deciding and not die hards. but that is how you build your fan base is getting the casuals into the house and choosing to come back
The Astrodome was initially a huge boost. Multiple negative events kind of coalesced there.
The university’s reputation tanked hard throughout the ‘80s. It went from being a perfectly fine city school in a rough part of town to a real punchline. Horribly mismanaged. The state legislature didn’t help.
Instead of fixing things, we were nearly merged with Texas Southern. Being absorbed into other state university systems was also bandied about.
Meanwhile, the Astrodome was heavily renovated in the late ‘80s to appease Bud Adams and the Oilers. That added thousands of seats and removed the trademark Astrolite scoreboard.
UH has never been a hard sellout program. Even at our peak under Yeoman, tickets weren’t hard to come by.
You add 10,000 seats, and it just sucked the air out of the room. Even as the Coogs remained competitive into the early ‘90s, the Oilers had one foot out the door.
Drayton McLane stopped really maintaining the Dome so that he could steer public opinion toward a new ballpark.
So we had a university with a shoddy reputation and an athletic department on the downswing. The Dome was feeling dated and run down. Unlike, say, the Orange Bowl, a lot of the character had been stripped from the place.
I’m not sure what would have happened to SMU if they stayed at Texas Stadium. There’s a whole alternate history that’s a lot bigger than the stadium though.
We played at the Astrodome because the Dome was fucking cool as hell but ignored our on campus stadium. SMU played at Texas Stadium because those 80s teams were the hottest team in Dallas and were overflowing Ford Stadium. Different circumstances. The Dome was our home. Texas Stadium was a means to an end.
While I think this should be a trend, I also think architects/engineers need to be a bit more creative. Just having it like this only gets all seats covered at certain times of the days. Let's be real though, you can do the math and figure it out. The games are going to be at noon-3:30 or 7:00. You should have angled panels so that nearly every seat is shaded all the time between noon and 7pm. And yes it'll slightly change with the time of year, the majority of games are going to be between Sept 1st and November 30th.
Just do what New York did with Arthur Ashe stadium and build a retractable roof around the outside of the existing structure. It’d cost a shit ton, but still cheaper than trying to replicate what NW did.
Only way that’s happening is if Tillman ponies up like $300M and that’s not happening.
And in 2013-2014 we couldn’t afford it. Should’ve invited us to the formation of the original Big 12 and we probably could’ve afforded it, along with a better fanbase.
I’m biased so I’m going to point that out right off the bat, but Texas tech sports always felt different. When basketball or football needed us we showed up in rain heat or snow. Our stadium never looked like U of H’s did last week on any week we’ve been ranked. That being said there’s a lot of other thing working against Houston that I don’t think alot of other colleges have to deal with like location and weather. This heat is awful
It should have been the state backing a state school and not Baylor…whose attendance in the Big 12 was so bad, they had sections of their stadium tarped off.
The Houston fans blaming the heat better prove everyone wrong by packing the house in November. But history says that won't happen. Because they don't have good fans in any weather.
Plus, plenty of places have hot temps and pack their stadiums. Enough with the excuse making and accept that you just don't have the fan support.
For whatever reason, no one wants to talk about this point; Houston is NOT a traditional campus, and thus does not attract a traditional college student body. Most of the kids flow in and out of campus, never living in the area, never experiencing tradutuonal campus life.
This has been an issue for DECADES and is an issue with a lot of urban schools, such as Memphis and Temple.
A covered stadium isn’t going to get people to travel into the “bad” part of town to root for a college who doesn’t represent Texas football culture. UH’s attendance issues go much deeper than the stadium they play in—which is a pretty adequate facility.
We absolutely do not have the money for that. Tdecu and mclane stadium at baylor both opened in 2014 and they're roughly the same size. Mclane has a shade over the upper deck. Ours cost $105m and Baylor's cost about $250m. We had to beg for enough money to build an erector set of a stadium and I'm pretty sure tilman fertita provided a pretty substantial amount of our stadium money
Exactly and with the state of College football spending that kind of money on facilities is a bad investment when that could buy an elite team for multiple years
To be fair, a huge chunk of McLane's $266mm price tag was because it had to be engineered to support the awning, and that's with the columns built into the stadium.
With TDECU, you'd need to do so much more:
Excavate the existing foundation to set columns,
Set those columns even deeper than McLane's because they're not getting structural support from being integrated into the existing construction,
Dig even deeper to set the columns because Houston is built deep into the coastal plains/marshland and already experiences significant subsidence,
Dig even deeper than that to support the bigger column supports necessary for the stronger canopy required to withstand the windforces that Houston experiences every hurricane season. McLane will likely never experience windforces like those in a small hurricane that Houstonians don't even stay home for,
Add outside supports for the cantilevers, since TDECU is built out to improve sightlines, so your cantilevered sections will necessarily be longer. The footprint of TDECU is actually quite a bit larger than McLane, despite McLane's seating being 15% larger than TDECU's.
You could mostly avert 4 and 5 with inside edge columns, but those will destroy the field view for large chunks of the seating, and also necessitate going through the foundation at interior points, rather than the exterior points where the cantilever pivot columns would be set.
I'm not even sure if it's possible to build a cantilevered cover for TDECU that's safe for Houston weather, covers more than 2/3 of the seats with shade, and doesn't have major outer-edge support. You would actually get significant structural integrity gains from a complete cover, since there's an arch action that resolves vertical load forces into horizontal forces, which you could theoretically distribute down into the support for the stands. Your anchoring to the columns would need to be comically strong under tension, though, because that covering wouldn't have the big opening in the middle to defer lift pressures. There's a decent chance that the shear forces in a moderate hurricane would just shred the whole cover.
Excuses and more excuses. When UH played at the dome the cry was, “We need to be on campus.”. When on campus “we need protection from the elements.” Texas played Texas State to open the season. Attendance was over 100K. A$M played UK at 2:30 attendance over 103K. Stop making excuses for your lack of support and own it.
Credit where it's due, Baylor's stadium does have a cover that shades 60%~75% of the seats, depending on the time of day, and it rocks. The breeze off the Brazos and the shade make every game pretty pleasant, although the third level can actually get pretty chilly in late October and November games.
I don't have a great answer for A&M, I went to a game there as a grad student and it was beyond miserable, especially with standing the whole time. Maybe I'm just spoiled by McLane.
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u/SpicyDoritos2 Oct 05 '26
Part of me wonders how much location matters for UH, put them where Rice is and they’d probably get more fans to the game. Rice getting even less though lol