Michigan Stadium: The Big House
Near Ann Arbor, Michigan
You are passing within a few blocks of the largest stadium in the United States. Michigan Stadium holds one hundred seven thousand six hundred one people officially, though on a crisp September evening it has packed in more than one hundred fifteen thousand, a figure that remains the largest recorded crowd in the history of college football.
The stadium was the obsession of one man: Fielding Yost, Michigan's longtime athletic director and the coach who built the program into a national power in the early nineteen hundreds. By the mid-nineteen twenties, Michigan was drawing crowds that dwarfed its old Ferry Field. Yost lobbied the regents relentlessly, and in April of nineteen twenty-six they approved a new stadium. Yost had the blueprints drawn to hold seventy-two thousand at the start, but he quietly insisted the footings be sunk deep enough to hold a hundred thousand someday. The field sits nearly sixty feet below ground level, which is why the structure looks modest from the outside and cavernous from within.
The first game was played on October first, nineteen twenty-seven, a thirty-three to nothing defeat of Ohio Wesleyan. The stadium's capacity grew steadily over the decades, driven by winning and by a radio announcer named Bob Ufer who described it as 'the hole that Yost dug, Crisler paid for, Canham carpeted, and Schembechler fills every cotton-pickin' Saturday afternoon.' Bo Schembechler coached here for twenty-one seasons, won or shared thirteen Big Ten titles, and turned Michigan into a standard by which other programs measured themselves.
By the time of its great renovation in two thousand ten, the stadium had sold out two hundred fifty-eight consecutive games over more than three decades. The renovation added luxury boxes and restrooms, something earlier fans pointedly lacked, and pushed the official count past one hundred seven thousand. The Big House is not just large. It is, for a hundred Saturdays per year, one of the loudest and most emotionally charged places in American sports.
