I attended Northwestern University’s opening football game
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at the $875 million Ryan Field in Evanston on Friday night.The stadium feels like what you’d expect from spending nearly a billion dollars: It’s stunning. The designers seem to have prioritized quality over quantity, as it has only 35,000 seats, down from 47,000 at the old Ryan Field. Evanston had the smallest Big Ten stadium by capacity before, and it retains that title.
But the new seats are comfortable. Bathrooms are plentiful. Fireworks shoot from the stadium roof. Food can be bought via sensor. There’s a walk-in beer cave. The student section’s noisemaking kickboards are strategically placed above the visiting team locker room, which is very funny and would make coach Hayden Fry proud (even though he was a Hawkeye).
But what the stadium has in amenities, it lacks in heart.
The Northwestern marching band, a fixture of the Northwestern football game day for a century, was sidelined.
The band learned days before kickoff that its traditional pregame field show was canceled, to be replaced (it turns out) with canned music and prerecorded videos.
Every Big Ten band performs a pregame show, and so do many Power Four conference teams.
But this past week, the Northwestern band’s pregame was silenced. Instead of running through a tunnel formed by the marching band, as has been the tradition for decades, the Northwestern football team ran through pyrotechnics and a tunnel of students to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” piped over the sound system. The band watched from the stands, members’ instruments in their hands.
Columbus would riot if Ohio State University’s marching band were barred from forming their pregame, Script Ohio, a sacred tradition, on the day they celebrated the opening of a new stadium. But in Evanston, the New Ryan Field corporate flagship had set its course days or weeks before, and there wasn’t room for the band’s pregame performance.
After a Daily Northwestern article broke the news of pregame’s cancellation one day before the game, Northwestern administrators were flooded with emails protesting the decision. In response to the onslaught, Mark Jackson, vice president for athletics and recreation, and Lindsay Vahl Dean, Alumni Association executive director, sent an email to band alumni a few hours before kickoff, explaining that “as it relates to the opening game at new Ryan Field, there is only a limited window between conference-mandated player warmups and the start of the game. As is appropriate for the opening of a new stadium, that window tonight will be used for stadium dedication activities.”
I was there for opening night. It seems clear that the private company running the New Ryan Field is more intent on monetizing the college football experience than providing the fans with connections to the history and traditions that make college sports special.
From 1979 to 1982, Northwestern lost 34 straight games — the longest losing streak in college football history, another unfortunate title we can’t seem to shake. But the marching band was there for every game, doggedly cheering the team on, penning such football chant classics as “Advance! Advance! Ambulate over the turf!” and “Articulate! Articulate! Use your tongue and teeth!” (Remember, it’s Northwestern.)
I marched trombone with the band all four years of my undergraduate years at Northwestern. I bleed purple. I went to two bowl games as a student and several more as an alum. I’ve spent thousands of hours and dollars supporting the Wildcats. My senior year, when my mom visited Evanston to see me march in a game, then-head coach Pat Fitzgerald greeted me by name on the sidewalk and shook her hand. My mom couldn’t believe how casual a Big Ten head coach was with a student member of the marching band. I told her that’s just how we do it at Northwestern.
This weekend, more than 100 marching band alumni, including me, will travel back to Evanston with their kids and their bad backs to march at the annual Homecoming game. For the first time since the alumni club — affectionally known as the NUMBALUMS — was formed 30 years ago, we’ve been told alumni marchers are not welcome on the field to perform the traditional NUMBALUMS pregame.
Alumni pregame is a quick trot down the field that takes less than three minutes from start to finish. That’s about all our backs can take, anyway. But according to the New Ryan Field’s management, Northwestern’s alumni marching band pregame doesn’t fit into the Homecoming game day. You know, the one dedicated to Northwestern alumni.
Let’s be honest: Northwestern’s enrollment is the Big Ten’s smallest, and as a private university, it doesn’t have a built-in fan base beyond the bounds of Evanston. Marching band alumni are among Northwestern’s most loyal football fans, donors and volunteers.
At a moment when the program could be celebrating the tradition and individuals who have supported this program at games for a century, it designed a stadium that has so far demonstrated every intention of relegating its staunchest supporters to the literal sidelines.
Ohio State would never.
I hope it was merely an oversight. I hope it was a mistake of a harried but well-meaning team scrambling to open the most expensive college stadium ever built.
Thanks for the stadium, but please remember who it was built for.
Brittany Williams graduated from Northwestern in 2009.
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