With both UMD and Rutgers football stadiums maxing out at about 52,000 will games move to Giants/Jets or Ravens/Redskin stadiums? Do you think they will look to increase capacity at their existing stadiums? Years ago I went to Michigan State v. Rutgers games at the Meadowlands and they sold out pretty quickly; granted there was probably mostly Sparty fans filling the house.


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I don't think so. I've been to both new Giants Stadium and Fedex Field (NFL stadiums) to watch the Chicago Bears play and those venues aren't any good.

The current capacity of their stadiums is enough for now, but if they need more seats/bleachers they will add onto their existing facilities. No need to play a regular slate of B1G Ten games in NFL stadiums.

Big Ten football is better played on-campus. I don't think the league will "suggest" playing elsewhere. It's up to Rutgers and Maryland.

I agree that college sports are always much better on campus. I was looking at the fact that both schools show their attendance numbers are already averaging in the mid to high 40,000 range and with schools like Ohio State, UM, PSU and Michigan State rolling in it seems like a lot of money left on the table with 52,000 max capacity. It also seems like it might go a long way toward generating extra money to pay for home stadium expansions. I just remember when at the Meadowlands games with Sparty and Rutgers I was always amazed at how many Michigan State fans filled the stadium, with a lot at fans stuck at tailgates that couldn't get tickets to get into the games.


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Rutgers Stadium is expandable to around 80K or 85K. Its also a different era for us. The number of people showing up to our games rooting for the home team is double or likely more than what it was back in the 80s/90s when we'd play Sparty or the Nits at the Meadowlands. I think for the right price we'll do a "neutral" site game at the Meadowlands from time to time, but nothing regular. And I agree with Waterloo on MetLife Stadium, I personally think its a joke. Other than the much wider concourses I don't see the improvement over the old Giants Stadium.

Yes, Strut, that's a big part of the path to building a bigger stadium ... by selling out your existing capacity multiple times a season.

Indeed, the fact that a given stadium capacity which might be sold out for big games is one of the things that drives season ticket sales ... there are the season ticket holders that are there every game, but there are also the season ticket holders that go to the big games. And if all of the big games are in stadiums that won't sell out ... that's less incentive for that second group bother to order season tickets.

UMD is going to try and keep games on campus and will be extremely hesitant to expand capacity at Byrd. Previous expansion efforts have not paid off, resulting in the cutting of sports teams and the switching of conferences.

I liked the old Giant Stadium over the new Met Life Stadium and definitely prefer Rutgers current expanded stadium over Met Life. You lose a lot of that college feeling at Met Life stadium.

If any game wss going to be moved it would be state penn. We are going to play on campus. We made that demand very clear when we signed the home and home with state penn a few years ago. The game day atmosphere is more important than selling more tickets.

Rutgers used to regularly play their biggest games at the Meadowlands before the current stadium was built. That was back when their stadium only sat 31,000. The last time they played there was in 2010 against Army and they got a $2.7 million payout for it. That was a special event being the first college game at the new stadium and featuring the two local teams, and it's unlikely there'll be a payday that big again. Rutgers is on the record saying they want to stay on campus and it would take a similarly large guarantee to get them to move a home game. They may still play at the Meadowlands in a negotiated OOC game or as the visiting team, but it's unlikely that we'll see any Big Ten games there.

What the Big Ten could do is host their own version of the Kickoff Classic and then invite a major FB program (say, Oklahoma) to play one of the major B1G teams. Flip the script of the Alabama/$EC cabal, then sell the TV rights to Fox, NBC or CBS. That to me is much better than conference games off campus. It's also a way for the likes of Nebraska and Iowa to get additional East coast exposure that isn't possible in a regular season.

Imagine the matchups:

NE-USC
OSU-Miami
UMich-OU
PSU-Texas

Inviting SEC schools to open the season in Big Ten country is one thing ... them taking the invite is something else. SEC schools don't leave SEC country very often before bowl season ... and of course they play many of their bowls in or near SEC country.

There's also how it fits into a 9 conference game schedule. The same schools that would like to play in a marquee kick-off classic would like to have a marquee P5 school every year, and normally would like to play seven home games every year, and getting marquee P5 schools normally requires a 1-1 contract. In the 9 conference game season, you want to schedule those 1-1's so they are home when you have 4 Big Ten opponents home, and away when you have 5 Big Ten opponents home. Which doesn't really leave the same room for a neutral site game that the SEC's eight game conference schedule give to Bama.