Ivan Maisel: The 11 best college football venues
The 150th Open Championship begins Thursday morning at the ancestral home of golf. The Old Course at St. Andrews tops the bucket list of anyone, player or fan, who loves the game. The last major of the year is being played just as the wheels of the 2022 college football season start to turn. Big 12 Conference Media Days begin Wednesday, the unofficial sign that college football summer is over.
The birthplace of college football is no longer a stadium. It’s not even a field. Rutgers built a gym there. But all serious college football fans have stadiums that hardwire into their nervous systems. It is why we go back, autumn after autumn, why the game is so much more than which team wins.
As the evolution of college football brings it closer to a professional model, as presidents and athletic directors begin to act more like team owners and less like academic administrators, I assembled a list of my 11 favorite venues to see a game.
For one thing, I needed a reminder amid all the money-grubbing chaos of the past two weeks of the tradition and beauty that continues to attract me to the game. For another, unlike St. Andrews, my 11 stadiums don’t require a passport to attend. It’s as far from Rutgers to St. Andrews as it is from Seattle to Miami, in case U-Dub joins the ACC.
The best part of seeing a game at these stadiums? They do not need to win for you to be present.
The venues are listed alphabetically by schools.
Alabama: Bryant-Denny Stadium
Once upon a time, Denny Stadium was so small (43,000) that Bear Bryant took Alabama to play home games in Birmingham and Mobile for money. That is a quaint memory now that Bryant-Denny Stadium (101,000) is a mass of crimson that engulfs Alabama football opponents. I don’t know which stadium first showed historic video before the game. But few fan bases react with the pride and noise that Alabama fans greet the scenes of Bryant and his great teams. Bama fans can get bored – you may have noticed that many games aren’t close – but Nick Saban’s success has turned a Tide home game into an event somewhere between competition and coronation.
Army: Michie Stadium
Army’s Michie Stadium is a jewel of a stadium on a campus where a football weekend encompasses so much than a game. The Corps of Cadets executes with knifelike precision on the Parade Ground on Saturday morning. The football team follows suit at Michie that afternoon. The parachute team delivers the game ball to midfield. The cannon booms out the news that the Black Knights have scored again. To sit in the stands, the Hudson River in the distance, and feel the grand history of Army football that took place right here – three national championships, three Heisman winners, 24 College Football Hall of Famers – makes Michie a rich experience.
Auburn: Jordan-Hare Stadium
One of the many cool things about Jordan-Hare Stadium is how little parking there is at the stadium. That means you have to walk through the Auburn campus to arrive. The campus is pretty and the Tiger fans pretty much tackle you to make you stop for a spell at their tailgate. Don’t linger – you need to be in your seat to watch the War Eagle soar around the stadium and land on his handler’s arm near midfield. Once kickoff arrives, you’ll see how a stadium can hold 85,000 fans and still be cozy. Jordan-Hare shoots straight up, which not only provides good sightlines but holds in the noise. And there’s a lot of noise. Auburn fans loves their Tigers.
Georgia: Sanford Stadium
It would be enough to watch a game Between the Hedges in one of the country’s great college towns. The iconic greenery that rims the sidelines of Sanford Stadium in Athens is cool, all right, but to me the best thing about the home of Georgia football is how gracefully this place wears its 93 years. The Dawgs play before almost 93,000 fans, yet Sanford Stadium has great sightlines and the shortest time from turnstile to seat of any jumbo college football stadium I know. This stadium, like so many others on college campuses, expanded more than once, which lends a ramshackle charm. Forget the hedges. Where else does a campus bridge overlook one end zone?
Notre Dame: Notre Dame Stadium
No stadium has modernized so much and maintained its tradition so well as Notre Dame. From the outside, Notre Dame Stadium is unrecognizable compared to my first visit many years and many more millions of dollars ago. But step inside and the magic remains. The experience of a game on this campus remains as magical as ever. The gothic architecture, the broad quad, the tailgating in the lots and the grilling outside the dorms, the four generations of 77,000 fans drawn as if by magnet across campus to the House That Rockne Built. Fan go through gates named after the five coaches to win national championships: Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, Dan Devine and Lou Holtz. That’s pretty much perfect.
Ohio State: Ohio Stadium
The stateliness of Ohio State’s home hearkens to a time when universities erected stadiums as monuments, not as cash cows. Ohio Stadium has become the latter, of course, as 105,000 seats and 52 luxury boxes attest. But the concrete exterior still says “old school.” The interior is, as are all modern stadiums, part video parlor, part museum, part light show and, yes, a playing field. Ohio Stadium is a destination not only to see the Buckeyes, but because that’s where you see The Best Damn Band in the Land perform Script Ohio. Oh, to be a senior sousaphone player who dots the “I.” Talk about peaking in college … .
Penn State: Beaver Stadium
Beaver Stadium isn’t much to look at – was it assembled in the dark? – but, man, can it host a party. I don’t know if Penn State fans started the midgame sing-along, but they have perfected it. Hearing 106,000 Nittany Lions belt out “Livin’ on a Prayer” is one of the great endorphin rushes that doesn’t involve a touchdown. They do a good job with the whiteout, too. Tailgating is a marathon, not a sprint, because it takes a while for a remote college town to disgorge that many people. The rise of Penn State from an “eastern” school to a Big Ten school with a national presence owes a great deal to Nittany Lion football.
Texas A&M: Kyle Field
Howdy, and welcome to the Kyle Field, home of the Texas Aggies. There’s no hospitality like Aggie hospitality, just as there’s no college football weekend quite like a Texas A&M weekend. From Midnight Yell Practice on Friday night to the 12th Man standing poised to enter the game, from the white unis of the yell leaders to the military precision of the Aggie Band, from the way the Kyle Field actually sways when everyone – and I mean damn near everyone – sings the Aggie War Hymn, a game at Texas A&M offers plenty that you’ll see nowhere else.
UCLA: Rose Bowl
The Rose Bowl remains the most beautiful college football stadium ever built. The setting in the Arroyo Seco beneath the San Gabriel Mountains elevates the experience. Shoot, I’m even a sucker for the neon script with the rose that faces the fans as they descend from the Pasadena hills. The beauty of the Rose Bowl masks its lack of creature comforts. The tunnels are long and narrow, and if you need to spelunk through them to get to the concessions or the bathroom, you’ll miss a couple of series. UCLA hasn’t won the Pac-12 South in 10 years, the Pac-12 in this century. Maybe this is the year that the Bruins make the Rose Bowl relevant again.
USC: Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
There is a romance to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a patina that only time and memory can form. It’s not just the Olympic cauldron behind the end zone, not just the corner tunnel from which both teams have emerged for nearly a century. It’s the great plays that have been made on that grass field, the USC dynasties in the 1960s, 1970s, and 2000s. The Coliseum is as much part of the connective tissue of Trojan tradition as the cardinal and gold uniforms. Those colors and this stadium will be the only living parts of USC’s past when the school moves to the Big Ten. Thank goodness the Coliseum is newly refurbished. We need it to stick around.
Washington: Husky Stadium
I’m a sucker for Husky Stadium. The setting, with a view beyond one end zone of Lake Washington and, on a clear day, the Cascade Mountains, is sublime. The roofs that jut over the grandstands not only provide protection from the rain but reverberate the decibel level produced by those often damp but never shy fans. Washington is the rare college football program that thrives in a pro sports market, which means you get a college football experience while enjoying a major American city. The fate of the Huskies is uncertain in this unsettling new age, but they have a solid program in an ideal venue in a great city. What’s not to like?