OT Cal 321 mill renovation with reduced seating?
Why in the world would you spend 321 million to renovate a stadium and reduce seating from 72k to 63k? If this helps Cal turn into a western power imagine all of the lost revenue. This has me scratching my head.
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=4847125
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:27 PM ^
I liked you better when you just posted MS Paint stuff. All of these real articles make my head hurt.
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:45 PM ^
Wow apparently someones sarcasm meter is broken. It was a joke people.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:16 PM ^
??? I don't see any posts that even responded to yours. We're all talking about the stadiums at Cal and Stanford.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:25 PM ^
I Was negbanged for what I thought was an OBVIOUSLY sarcastic response.
January 25th, 2010 at 11:19 PM ^
I don't consider -1 and -2 a negbang
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:28 PM ^
I don't think Cal gets a guaranteed sell out even when they are pretty good (as they have been at times lately). Fewer, nicer seats that they can charge more for probably won't cost them much dough and will look a lot better. Stanford made a similar move when they rebuilt their stadium going from 85,000 to 50,000.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:13 PM ^
Though Stanford's new stadium is pretty nice, I kind of resent the fact that they destroyed all that history -- the old one had seen some big moments.
January 22nd, 2010 at 10:12 PM ^
I live in the Bay Area. I don't know why Cal reduced capacity. They are always at or near capacity.
Stanford, though, is a different story. They wildly expanded their stadium in the '80s to get the Super Bowl. Except for successful seasons or big games, there were often 20-30,000 (and sometimes more) empty seats. So they phased down to avoid empty stadium syndrome. Not so with Cal.
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:34 PM ^
Maybe they added luxury boxes. That revenue can more than offset the loss of regular seating. Wonder how the market is for Cal luxury suites?
I see you have added the Bo icon to your collection - actually not a bad likeness - the shades make it.
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:42 PM ^
But PurpleStuff knows his shit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Stadium
The Stanford bigwigs believed that reducing the size and creating a more intimate venue would increase ticket sales, so perhaps that's what the Cal people are thinking too.
It's amazing that in the Bay area it's so hard to fill that dinky little Stanford stadium. I read on another website that avg. attendance in the 2008 season was a little over 30K.
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:48 PM ^
Hippies don't like football.
January 23rd, 2010 at 3:38 PM ^
Keep in mind that Stanford's a private school with a relatively small enrollment, so its alumni base isn't that large. And it hasn't been consistently strong enough to draw a big "subway alum" base.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:46 PM ^
I've been to Cal many times and went to a few games, they are definately the type of crowd that would prefer quality over quantity. Their stadium right now is in awful shape, and their alumni would have no problem paying more for tickets to a much improved venue.
January 23rd, 2010 at 5:52 AM ^
My fiancé and I attended the Maryland vs. Cal opener. The stadium was not even close to capacity and the crowd seemed to lack excitement. The location is awesome, great team, respectable fans, but not really into football. The experience just made me appreciate/miss everything about Ann Arbor - the tradition, fans and team.
January 23rd, 2010 at 12:13 PM ^
Did you see a lot of hippies?
January 23rd, 2010 at 3:56 PM ^
They were all jammin' crunchy tunes, drinking shitty beer and bitching about their rich parents. Down with capitalist pigs maaaaan!
January 23rd, 2010 at 8:21 AM ^
It's incredible that given many of our alum leave the area and Ann Arbor is not in an area like USC or Cal is, yet we still pack 107,000+ in every game.
January 23rd, 2010 at 1:23 PM ^
Doesn't Cal cover up the corner sections of the endzones with huge tarps to perhaps hide the fact that they can't sell out the stadium as is?
Maybe some of that money is going towards earthquake proofing too. I think I recall it sitting right on a fault line and slowly getting pulled apart.
January 23rd, 2010 at 3:51 PM ^
Wasn't this the proposal that was held up because local activists feared that like three old trees would be cut down? How did they resolve that?
Regarding the steep cost, a lot of it has to go toward increasing the stadium's ability to withstand an earthquake.