Beaver Stadium and the Nittany Lions

The stadium rising above the flatlands of Happy Valley is not just a football venue. It is the fourth-largest stadium in the world, the second-largest in the Western Hemisphere, with an official seating capacity of about one hundred six thousand three hundred. On game days, it becomes one of the largest temporary cities in Pennsylvania.

Penn State's football home was originally called Beaver Field, named for Pennsylvania Governor James A. Beaver, a Civil War general and one of the university's early benefactors. The steel grandstand sat about a mile west of its current location for decades. In nineteen fifty-nine, Penn State did something almost unimaginable: it disassembled the entire structure, loaded it onto flatbed trucks, moved it across campus, and rebuilt it in the university's northeast corner. The renamed Beaver Stadium opened on September seventeenth, nineteen sixty, with Penn State defeating Boston University twenty to nothing.

The stadium that opened held forty-six thousand two hundred eighty-four seats. What followed was one of the most sustained expansion campaigns in college football history. Additions in nineteen sixty-nine and nineteen seventy-two pushed capacity past fifty-seven thousand. In nineteen seventy-seven and seventy-eight, engineers sliced the steel grandstand into segments, jacked them twelve and a half feet into the air, and poured new concrete stands underneath, essentially building a new stadium beneath an existing one. A north upper deck arrived in nineteen ninety-one. Further expansions in two thousand one pushed the stadium past one hundred thousand seats.

The Nittany Lions under Joe Paterno won national championships in nineteen eighty-two and nineteen eighty-six and turned Beaver Stadium into one of college football's defining environments. The tradition of White Out games, in which more than a hundred thousand fans wear white simultaneously, has become one of the most visually spectacular scenes in American sports. The stadium sits in a bowl of the valley, ringed by mountains, the crowd noise trapped and amplified by the terrain itself. On the right autumn Saturday, it is unlike anywhere else in the country.