The Big House

The stadium to your west holds more than one hundred seven thousand people. To put that in perspective: if everyone inside stood shoulder to shoulder, they would outnumber the entire population of Ann Arbor by roughly two to one.

Michigan Stadium was completed in nineteen twenty-seven. The first game was played on October first of that year, a thirty-three to nothing defeat of Ohio Wesleyan. The official dedication came three weeks later, on October twenty-second, when the Wolverines beat Ohio State twenty-one to nothing. The program was already a power before the stadium existed. The stadium simply gave it a building commensurate with its ambitions.

The original capacity was seventy-two thousand, already enormous by the standards of the era. The athletic director at the time, Fielding Yost, made sure the infrastructure was built for expansion. He got it. The capacity has been increased several times since the original construction, adding sections, adding rows, adding the press boxes and suite levels that give the stadium its current skyline.

The nickname the Big House was popularized by the broadcaster Keith Jackson beginning in the mid-nineteen eighties. Before Jackson, people just called it Michigan Stadium. After Jackson, no further explanation was needed anywhere in the country that followed college football.

Michigan has led the nation in football attendance in forty-eight of the past fifty-one seasons. The stadium has recorded more than one hundred thousand fans for three hundred twenty-nine straight home games, a streak stretching back decades.

On autumn Saturdays, this corner of Ann Arbor becomes one of the most densely populated places in Michigan. People come from every part of the state and beyond. They wear the maize and blue. For a few hours the stadium is its own city, organized around a grass rectangle and a game that, in this place, has been taken very seriously for more than a century.