Northwestern's new Ryan Field is taking shape nicely, but will football Saturdays live up to the hype?
There’s no place like home for Northwestern football.
No place at which it’s harder for the Wildcats to win, that is.
Last year’s team lost both Big Ten games it played, against Indiana and Wisconsin, at the pop-up stadium on campus that was the brainchild of former coach Pat Fitzgerald. The Wildcats were 2-3 on the lakefront — beating only Miami (Ohio) and Eastern Illinois while also losing to Duke — and dropped their other two “home” games to Ohio State and Illinois at Wrigley Field.
Five teams will visit Evanston this season, headlined by Oregon in September. In November, the Wildcats will face Michigan and Minnesota at Wrigley, where they’ve yet to win a game in five tries. Who do they think they are, the 2024-25 White Sox?
And yet …
“We’re on the rise,” third-year coach David Braun insists.
Really, though? Maybe so.
Fitzgerald’s last four teams combined to go 14-31 overall and 9-26 in the Big Ten. Under the lingering cloud of a hazing scandal in which he had no role, Braun is a modest 12-13 and 7-11 in the league. But the Wildcats do have a well-thought-of athletic director, Mark Jackson, who’s been on the job for less than a year. They have the potential of a more level playing field after the much-discussed House vs. NCAA settlement that ended the amateur model once and for all. And, most notably, they have an $850 million-plus Purple palace — the new Ryan Field — under construction and scheduled to open for games in 2026.
That’s next year, if you didn’t know it — a century after the 1926 opening of Dyche Stadium, which was renamed Ryan Field in 1997 and demolished in early 2024.
“Our old facility was the worst in the Big Ten by a lot,” says Pat Ryan Jr., the CEO of Ryan Sports, which is overseeing the new stadium’s development.
The Sun-Times took an exclusive Monday tour of the well-in-progress build site, accompanied by Ryan, whose 88-year-old billionaire father is a Northwestern alum and its most prolific (and eponymous) benefactor. The Ryan family donated $480 million in 2021 as part of a fund-raising campaign that piled over $6 billion into university coffers. A state-of-the-art, privately funded stadium will be the centerpiece of that effort and signals the school’s determination to not only avoid fading from relevance in the supercharged world of college football, but to compete at a higher level than ever.
“If we get this right, we’ll see echoes of this in other buildings,” Ryan Jr. says. “If we get it wrong, it’ll be one of a kind.”
There will be fewer seats — 35,000 — and views Ryan promises will be “the best in college or pro football.” He might be right, given how impressively close all seats will be to the playing field. From the nearest ones, the sideline will be a mere 48 feet away. From the farthest ones, the sideline will be 136 feet away. It presents a fascinating comparison to the sport’s largest venue, Michigan Stadium, which accommodates nearly three times as many fans but whose best seats — again, best — are 235 feet from the sideline, according to Northwestern.
True nosebleeds? Ryan Field won’t have them. Every fan in the house will have a proper seat — no benches, either — that’s protected from the elements by a canopy. The list of amenities beyond that is forward-thinking and long. From a fan’s point of view, there will be far worse places to take in a football game.
“Premium for everyone,” the school declares.
Gazing down from the upper bowl amid the construction, the field does appear tantalizingly close. Hey, did somebody drop a nickel on the 42-yard line?
The spaces above the end zones for video boards are enormous for such a small venue. The student section rises steeply at one end of the field, in part to amplify the voices of the loudest, most revved-up fans in the house.
This is different. This could be a good time.
Or as famous alum Michael Wilbon narrates in a promotional video, “Welcome to a new era of college football, a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-imagine the college football experience.”
That might be a bit much. One suspects Ohio State, Penn State, Oregon and Michigan, to say nothing of Georgia, Texas and Alabama, will remain quite prominent in this new era, cavernous-relic home bases and all. And, let’s face it, many Northwestern fans likely have spent entire decades re-imagining their college football experience.
A new stadium is great, but don’t the Wildcats have to win more — a lot more — than they have been for it to be viewed as a success?
“From my perspective, yes,” Jackson said. “It’s our job to put the most competitive team on the field. In terms of performance of the team in general, we have really high expectations.”
Either way, they’re building it. Will fans come? And not the ones wearing the bad guys’ jerseys.
“My intention as AD is to pack it in purple,” Jackson said. “We want to create one of the best home-field advantages in college football.”
Braun is sticking his neck out just as far.
“I have incredible reverence and appreciation for things this football program has accomplished through the years, on and off the field,” he said. “But why can’t we do it better than we’ve ever done it before? With a new Ryan Field on the horizon, we should be asking ourselves that.”