Northwestern bet nearly $1 billion on a stadium. Opening night couldn’t have gone better
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EVANSTON, IL – The day begins like hundreds of others have over the past two years.
The way it ends?
History.
The blissful, century-in-the-making kind of history.
That's why Pat Ryan Jr. finds himself simultaneously exhausted and energized as his alma mater, Northwestern, prepares to open the most significant athletic facility in school history. Fittingly, the new Ryan Field will welcome fans exactly 100 years after the original stadium hosted its first game on Oct. 2, 1926.
“My wife would say she's looked forward to me coming back home,” Ryan Jr., the driving force behind the ambitious, nearly $1 billion project, told USA TODAY Sports. "I see her but usually she's falling asleep, and we're waking up…
"This is a project that we had a very specific vision for to create something different and to do that, you really had to drive. A real hyperfocus on making sure that all 3,000 people who worked on this understood that vision, and that meant a million trade-offs and decisions to figure out how to make it work and come in on time, virtually on budget, and it also required the details.”
Those details, Ryan Jr., Northwestern athletic director Mark Jackson and other stakeholders believe, are what will separate this venue from every other stadium in college football. Not just Michigan's Big House or Ohio State's Horseshoe.
All of them.
At a cost expected to exceed $875 million and approach $900 million, Ryan Field stands as the most expensive stadium in college football history. Despite seating only 36,000 fans, it carries a price tag comparable to the NFL's new Buffalo Bills stadium.
Among its features: AI-powered concession stands, an exterior food village and premium-area access for every seat in the building.
“When the family made a decision to make a hundred-year commitment,” Ryan Jr. told USA TODAY Sports, “and the university did as well, then my job was to say, how do we make it great? How do we coalesce around a vision? And so that vision, in a lot of ways, evolved from 2020-2023.
“But what you see today is everything we dreamt of back three years ago, and everything we spent two or three years kind of evolving and dreaming our way to.”
Of course, none of it matters if the football team doesn't do its part in Northwestern's grand excavation and rehabilitation project.
Holy moly, does it deliver.
David Braun's Wildcats don't merely rise to the occasion. They seize it.
Visiting Penn State, with all its trappings of tradition, championships and self-importance, looks less like a rebuilding blue blood under first-year coach Matt Campbell and more like a program under construction.
Northwestern runs. Then runs some more.
The Wildcats rack up more than 500 yards of offense, including 413 on the ground, attacking with a diabolical, wing-T-inspired rushing assault that leaves Penn State grasping for answers.
“This is something that dreams are made of, a night like tonight” Braun says afterward. “What this means to our university, this coaching staff, our student-athletes, this community… What we saw with this community (Friday night), it gets me emotional.”
Emotion is everywhere.
In the Chicago-themed food village buzzing outside the stadium. In the Northwestern band marching and blasting through the streets more than an hour before kickoff. In the ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring Ryan Jr., his family, university officials and political dignitaries gathered to celebrate the culmination of years of work.
Even if the ceremonial snip comes a few minutes behind schedule at 4:39 p.m. CT.
"We made it," Ryan Jr. tells USA TODAY Sports amid a sea of supporters inside the west-side club. "Made it through by the Herculean efforts of our workers, who were unbelievable. It was fantastic, but it was tough.
"We thought we'd maxed out at 742 workers on site. We've been at 1,200 for several months now. For the last couple months, we've 210 electricians, 60 of whom fly in from New York and Boston on Monday mornings and fly back home on Friday nights.”
The evening proves far less enjoyable for the visiting Nittany Lions.
Northwestern scores the first points in the history of the new Ryan Field before 7:30 p.m. with a field goal. Ten minutes later, the Wildcats are in the end zone, slicing through Penn State's defense with alarming ease.
By 10:50 p.m., Ryan Jr. is navigating the postgame media scrum while Braun and a handful of players prepare to discuss a 34-13 victory that, somehow, feels far more lopsided than the final score suggests.
By midnight, more than 17 hours after arriving at the stadium, Ryan Jr. is finally headed home.
Sleep?
Not a chance.
Instead, he settles in nearby and begins reliving the day's moments. At 3:02 a.m., he's still active on social media, pausing on photo galleries and highlights from a night decades in the making.
The dreams, however, do not end with football.
Northwestern's new home is expected to host every Wildcats football game and several major concerts annually. Ryan Jr., unsurprisingly, is already hard at work making those events a reality.
May and June of 2027 figure to be especially busy in Evanston.
"Think about it like this," Ryan Jr. says. "If you're an artist, there are bigger places you can perform. But if you want to connect with fans, the intimacy here is different.
"The paradox of this stadium is that it feels intimate when you're sitting in it, but when you're standing on the field, it feels massive. As an artist, you can see the person in the top row. That creates a really unique connection. That's what we're trying to create."
A family affair, certainly for the Ryans.
But also for Northwestern.
And on this night, the significance of that family, and this moment, feels enormous.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Northwestern bet nearly $1 billion on a stadium. Opening night couldn’t have gone better
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