The Horseshoe: A Religion Built in Concrete

The stadium was designed to be the largest poured-concrete structure in the world, and in nineteen twenty-two, when it opened, that is what it was.

Ohio State University had been playing football since eighteen ninety and had outgrown its previous field. The new stadium was designed by architect Howard Dwight Smith in a horseshoe shape, open at the south end, so that the Olentangy River bottomland could be preserved outside the curve. It seated sixty-six thousand two hundred ten people. The construction cost was one million three hundred forty thousand dollars, financed largely through a public subscription campaign among alumni who pledged money before a single shovel broke ground.

The first game, against Ohio Wesleyan on October seventh, nineteen twenty-two, drew twenty-five thousand people and left the stadium conspicuously half empty. The dedication game, against Michigan, drew a full house. Michigan won nineteen to zero. Ohio State would spend the next century trying to correct that opening impression.

The stadium is now called Ohio Stadium but is universally called the Horseshoe or the Shoe. It has been expanded multiple times. Current capacity exceeds one hundred two thousand, making it one of the five largest stadiums in the world by capacity. On autumn Saturdays it holds a population larger than most Ohio cities.

What that scale means about Columbus is worth sitting with. This is not Chicago or Cleveland. It doesn't have a professional football team. What it has is Ohio State, and Ohio State has the Horseshoe, and on game days the city organizes itself around those hundred-thousand-plus people moving through it in scarlet and gray. College football in Columbus is not entertainment. It is civic identity in a very specific, very American, and occasionally terrifying way.