EVANSTON, Ill. – The official capacity for Northwestern’s new $875 million football stadium is 35,000. But that doesn’t mean it has 35,000 seats.
This week I toured the nearly complete Ryan Field (opening Oct. 2 against Penn State) for the first time and tweeted a few photos and a video. I did not anticipate it would blow up like it did, with more than 1 million views. Based on the comments, it was because of one sentence: “There are no seats in the student section.”
Wildcat Wall is a 2,000-person “Safe Standing” section directly behind the south end zone, consisting solely of empty rows separated by metal railings. The concept is straight out of European soccer stadiums, where some clubs’ rowdiest supporters stand in a terrace behind one goal for the entire match.
Which is exactly what virtually every student section in college football — yes, including Northwestern’s — does every Saturday. Pretty cool, right?
To my surprise, though, a lot of the commenters were, um, horrified? One called it “diabolical.” They can’t sit at halftime?? The games are four hours! What if a kid had too many at the tailgate?
There were also, of course, no shortage of jokes about the quality of the product.
“I’m going to be the fun police here — hate it,” college football humorist and 2020 Iowa grad Lucy Rhoden said in a TikTok video. “It’s Northwestern. What are you going to do when it’s 24-0 in the second quarter. Stand there?”
(I must quickly remind Lucy that my alma mater went 3-1 against hers during her time there.)
I must confess, I fired off that tweet on my phone in about 10 seconds. With hindsight, it could have used some more context. So, I called up Pat Ryan Jr., CEO of Ryan Sports Development (and son of the stadium’s namesake), to provide some more detail about Wildcat Wall and address some of your questions.
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
First of all, what is “safe standing”?
It comes from European football, and it’s designed to provide supporters with the most energized environment to use as part of their support base. Obviously the whole stadium is primarily one team, but the supporter section is kind of the heart of it, right? And the reason it’s so energized is because of the safe standing – you can essentially put more people closer to the field than you can with traditional seats. And that’s why they have handrails. You can stand and know it will be very safe.
We can put 2,000 students in an area that might not normally fit half that. It’s not that we don’t want them to sit, it’s that most of our students don’t want to sit.
Is there a specific European stadium that you emulated?
In a lot of ways, it’s more like the German ones because they’re steeper. They say 34 degrees is generally considered the steepest you can go from a safety perspective. Being Northwestern, we went to 33 degrees because we’re concerned Midwesterners. We want one less than the full extreme.
We took what they call the slope and the things that make it intense, and looked at EPL and some of the German ones. We’re minority investors in (AFC Bournemouth), so we took ideas from that, but then you had to custom fit it to our building. You can basically access it from all three levels, which is why we kind of go with the Wildcat Wall. Because it does look like a giant imposing wall.
Is there any option for students who do want to sit?
Anybody who wants to sit has two choices.
One, we have stools available for people who feel like that’s important. If you want to sit, as you’re walking in, you can ask the usher for a student chair if you want to sit (in Wildcat Wall).
And the other thing is — for the first game, we expect to have 2,500 to 3,000 students. But 1,000 of those seats will be regular seats. Also, we have the two sections adjacent to the video board that form a Y (above the goal posts) that are also available to students as necessary.
So, if you don’t want to sit in (Wildcat Wall) at all, we’ll have student seats that are as comfortable as every other seat in the stadium, with arm rests and a cup holder. Seats that people would pay a lot of money for if we didn’t allocate them to the students for free.
(Ryan also wanted to make clear that there is ADA seating within the Wildcat Wall as well.)
I personally don’t think people are going to come asking for those stools before the game. But what about halftime?
I don’t think they’ll want to stay in their seats.
We have this incredible Student Hall that’s underneath the Wildcat Wall that’s super cool. It’s got a $5 concession menu for students. It’s got a student hype tunnel, it has a DJ, it has all this memorabilia from old Northwestern. And then we have a student plaza right outside the stadium with benches and landscaping.
My bigger worry is not will they have plenty to do; it’s how do we make sure they don’t get so caught up in what they’re doing and lose track of time.
So fans can leave the stadium and come back?
Oh yeah. Our security line is in the parking lots. We have 200,000 square feet of festival grounds that wrap the building. Think Super Bowl, where they have that security buffer out and then they wrap it in festivals on your way in. Same principle. Probably 40,000 to 50,000 square feet of it is student space for parties and activities.
The risk is if (Northwestern is losing), they leave (the game). But I think we’re a good team. (Offensive coordinator) Chip Kelly is going to add some flash factor we haven’t had before.
