What additions would you make to Michigan Stadium?
You are now the Czar of Michigan football and can make any changes to the Big House as you want. The stadium has obviously had many changes over the years and who knows what it'll look like in another 50+ years. Would you wrap around the structures in the endzones or put in upper decks? Maybe tear down the skyboxes all together to create Yost's original vision of 150,000 capacity. How would you make the stadium acoustics better to increase crowd noise?
Maybe you want to put a giant noodle on the concourse and shoot off fireworks. Let your imagination run wild on this slow slow news day.
What am I looking at
Free Wifi that works all day every Saturday!
I would widen out the concourse away from the stadium to increase the amount of space available and then do the following:
1. Put TVs throughout the concourse & in every bathroom with a live feed to the broadcast
2. Shoot the person in charge of concessions into the sun and replace them with someobody who likes food. Dramatically increase the number of food stations & increase the choices available
3. Serve beer
4. Widen the entrance points to the seating to reduce the bottlenecks entering & departing. Increase the number of ushers at the entry point to assist people in locating their seats
5. Increase the number of bathrooms.
I've always thought that a concession stand that focused on food from the visiting team's region/state/etc would be a cool way to add some variety to the food each week.
Nobody wants coolers full of poop in late November.
Back in the olden days (before Covid), the Club would have food just like this! It was pretty cool, but hard to do for some schools. Like Rutgers? Northwestern? I suppose for Chicago you could do Chicago style pizza, but they didn't do that. Iowa and Nebraska got corn based stuff. Wisconsin got Brats. OSU got Cincinnati chili. It would be cool if they could do it for the whole stadium.
For Chicago? There are these obscure treats known as Chicago dogs and Al’s beef… LOL
Added bathrooms - you can easily miss 10 minutes of the game if you need to wait in a bathroom line. I've seen pretty high-end temporary bathrooms at golfing events, and these could be added by the east side fence next to the Victors parking lot, and a similar one next to the west sidee fence. It could look much better than a simple block of porta-potties, accomplish the same job, and not be too expensive.
What about hookers?
only if there’s also blow available
madhatter tells me this is an excellent way to spend a football Saturday, particularly on bye weeks
With micro doses of “shrooms
#3 for sure! Most schools already allow beer sales. I'm sure it feeds a lot of pockets within each school's athletic department with a 800% markup. Hell, it probably pays for some of the low maintenance olympic sports itself.
Wifi with enough bandwidth for 100k fans to check scores simultaneously. Give each device an upper limit so that a few fans don't try to stream Game of Thrones in 4k and slow down everyone else.
Alternatively, maybe there's room on the giant new scoreboards to show out of town scores. Or they could rotate through them more often if there's not a permanent place. Is weird that they only do it a few times a game, especially with the length of commercials
music system reserved only for school bands
Mr. Brightside wouldn't be the same
March 30th, 2023 at 10:31 AM ^
Good point
Seats between the scoreboard and press boxes. Should have been done a long time ago.
And freeD camera set up. Michigan should have had it set up years ago.
Repaint the seat numbers to give 21st century American asses enough room to sit next to each other. This would require reducing the seating capacity by 10-ish percent; maybe bring it down to right at 100k.
Add bathroom and concession capacity by 5-10%.
If these changes were done, maybe I could pee and get food and return to my seat all within the halftime break. Does that seem like such a difficult ask?
It’s literally called the big house, so no thanks on capacity reduction kthx:
lose weight so your ass fits
refrain from eating at halftime to assist with weight loss
wear depends
profit
Better wifi for sure. Also, I'd be in favor of eventually replacing the bench seats with individual seats with backs, like every pro football and baseball stadium in America. Yeah, the capacity of the stadium would drop. But there are already so many empty seats, it wouldn't make much of a difference for the majority of the games.
Make seats bigger, add upper deck seats to A. Keep in more noise and B. Keep seating capacity similar
Make seats.. smaller? May as well just sell 2 people to each seat and have one sit on the others lap then.
Was supposed to be bigger...whoops.
To answer a different question--if we had to replace the stadium with a different style, I'd go for Husky stadium--one end open with a view and overhangs that trap the sound.
Install bidets on all of the toilets and standing urinals in the woman's restrooms.
as much fun as it would be to say, 'bigger!; in some fashion, i predict that within the next 20, maybe even the next 10 years, the big house won't be close to selling out and we would be investing hundreds of millions of dollars to then showcase a larger area of unoccupied seats.
attendance at events will go down. football will still be big, but not as big. and when harbaugh leaves, if there is any drop off in performance for the next hire, that stadium will empty out, relatively speaking.
Awning system to provide shade and keep the noise in. Have it be on a suspended cable system, much like how the Colosseam. Minus elephants being there to drive them open and shut.
what's your problem with elephants?
As a current student I have two much needed suggestions.
1. SERVE BEER IN THE STADIUM - and not for the reason you think, the amount of "pre-gaming" going on due to the lack of alcohol in the stadium crates the least enjoyable gate experience of all time where 10-20,000 shitfaced students are all forced through 1 goddamn gate. Its worse than a moshpit in there and people are trampled each gameday.
2. Expand the student gate to at least 2 or 3 student gates to further address said horror.
More cell phone Towers, they can be made to look like something else like trees or flagpoles for the college banners
WiFi and some sort of shade structure (would be sweet to have retractable awnings for hot/sunny or rainy days. Not enough shelter from the elements in the bowl). That’s about it.
SunSetter Retractable Awnings for the win!
I was thinking more like the shades on the Colosseum.
I would probably add 1 dumb waiter for every section, probably 100 or so throughout the stadium. Think about it. Makes sense.
And pneumatic tubes, lots of them.
Build a Seattle Seahawks-esque roof to keep in even more sound
Bring back the troughs.
Saved me and a bunch of fellow guys a lot of pissing time back in my student days in the 80s :>)
I scrolled a long way to make sure this was mentioned. Back in the day there was a long line at the women's bathroom for the first game or maybe two. Then no lines at all except maybe just before the kick and the beginning of the half. There was virtually never a line at the men's room or, if there was, it moved at a slow walking pace.
Second thing..... I'm not a big soccer fan, but the Euros belting out their tunes a capella is epic. Mr. Brightside should be one of 5 or 10 or 20 songs our stadium owns that can be deployed during any convenient 6 minute timeout.
Lest we forget, fancypants yachtsman Bill Martin actually went to bat to retain the troughs when the renovations happened under his watch. But despite his repeated efforts, they were no longer code.
Completely enclose the stadium. Add boxes/club seating in the endzones, trap in the noise and make the place even louder.
I'd also like to see a separate tunnel for visitors. Not because of what's happened recently, but having a separate, tiny, very claustrophobic visitor's tunnel does have an effect in some regard.
Better concessions. Sorry, but we can do better than what we have.
Post fuck Ohio state on every entrance into the seats
1. Sell beer - paid $9.50 for a 16 oz can of Busch Light in Iowa City at the UM win last year. Imagine the profits and then ask some of the donors to set up NILs instead of direct donations to the Department.
2. Better internet for the ENDLESS parade of 3 min TV timeouts.
3. Fix the East side mosh pit by building more walking paths to the east. Been stuck in that mess too often.
4. Allow sealed bottled water again. Two per customer.
That would be a good start.
If you think it's already awful getting in and out of the seats now, or that it's already awful trying to go to the bathroom now, add multiple tall boys into the mix.
What makes Iowa's setup work for this is that there's plenty of room for their isolated beer stations in the concourse plus there are large bathrooms every couple sections going up and down each concourse. Michigan does not have that kind of space (nor capacity for the concessions it has now), or the bathrooms.
You read it here first: Unless they pretty much reimagine the entire physical plant of Michigan Stadium, including bathrooms and the flow of foot traffic, beer sales will be an absolute disaster of epic proportions before you get to the predictable behavioral issues, too. (Back to Iowa, I'm glad our seats last year weren't two seats over, because the guy behind us with beer in hand projectile vomited before the first quarter was even up.)
I'd like a full service casino and sportsbook with a view of the field. Similar to the children's hospital in Iowa but a casino. It should offer Las Vegas style shows so if the game gets a little boring you can go watch Celine Dion or the Blue Man group.
The Vu in Ypsi appears permanently closed... makes one consider the possibilities....
( I kid of course). As a happy Ypsi resident, I'm thrilled the thing is shuttered. I have no problem with gals making their livings. It just didn't need to be the anchor of the downtown.)
Oh to hear Carl Grapentine invite the crowd to stand and wave to the lunatics at the sports book.
Add rows while widening each seat by a few inches. Capacity remains the same but the experience is more comfortable for fans. People are taller/larger than they were in 1927.
I'd continue it upwards, and add another 30000 seats, but lower the price so low that it will be sold out, with entire families. But the reason this hasn't been done yet i imagine is because it won't sell out, and then it won't pay for itself, not to mention the bad vibe that comes with not selling out vs selling out every game at 105000.
If Tennessee ever attempts to surpass us, there are already plans in place to build more seats so we stay the biggest stadium in US.