Autzen Stadium: The Loudest House in College Football

Autzen Stadium sits just north of the Willamette River in Eugene, and for several decades it was one of the most feared venues in college football. Not because of its size, which at about fifty-four thousand seats is modest by Power Five standards, but because of its noise. On October twenty-seventh, two thousand seven, during a victory over the USC Trojans, the crowd registered one hundred twenty-seven point two decibels, a sound-pressure record for a college football game at the time. The stadium's concrete bowl, closed on all sides, traps and amplifies crowd sound in a way that makes visiting teams' communication nearly impossible.

The stadium opened on September twenty-third, nineteen sixty-seven, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and built on an artificial landfill in just nine months for about two and a half million dollars. Athletic director Leo Harris had campaigned for years to replace the cramped campus facility at Hayward Field, and philanthropist Thomas J. Autzen provided a key gift that put the project over the top. The Ducks lost their first game there, seventeen to thirteen against Colorado, but they have made up for it many times since.

For most of the stadium's first three decades the Ducks were a middle-tier program in what was then the Pac-Ten. The transformation came under head coach Chip Kelly, who arrived in two thousand nine and turned Oregon into an offensive innovator. Kelly's no-huddle, up-tempo attack became a model imitated across college football. He recruited a quarterback from Hawaii named Marcus Mariota, who went on to win the Heisman Trophy in two thousand fourteen after throwing forty-two touchdowns and just four interceptions. That season the Ducks crushed Florida State fifty-nine to twenty in the inaugural College Football Playoff semifinal at the Rose Bowl, one of the most lopsided performances in that game's history.

Autzen's home winning streak from nineteen ninety-seven to two thousand one stretched to twenty-four games. On autumn Saturdays it remains one of the loudest places in the country, a fact that visiting coaches list in their scouting reports as a genuine competitive obstacle.