Ben Hill Griffin Stadium is about to change forever. (Photo by Neil Shulman, In All Kinds Of Weather)
We’ve known for awhile now that Florida Gators AD Scott Stricklin has been planning renovations to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium for some time, with the effects scheduled to begin taking place in 2024. Today, the first tangible step- or more accurately, a pre-step- toward those renovations was made.
Florida has announced plans to select its architect for the Ben Hill Griffin Stadium makeover this month. In the statement, Stricklin seemed to be understandably excited, yet at the same time calculated:
“We’ve conducted a number of studies over the last five-plus years about what the future could look like for Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. We’ve engaged with vendors that specialize in iconic venues and stadium experience for both fans and players while offering a variety of solutions. It is now time to take that information and engage with an architect who can present renovation, construction and phasing options for The Swamp.”
But it was what Stricklin said a month ago at the SEC spring meetings that was the most telling: “Whatever work we do there doesn’t need to be a bandaid. It needs to be a multigenerational solution to continue to give that stadium for future generations a chance to come watch the Gators there.”
In that latter statement, Stricklin is hitting on one major point that the winning architect is going to have to deliver on.
I’m talking, of course, about the dwindling attendance issues throughout college football. Put bluntly, fans just aren’t coming to games anymore- and that’s happening to the Gators as much as any other program. Even if you put aside the fact that the late summer heat of Florida routinely breaks triple figures, plus humidity, the sum of the fanbase just isn’t opting to make the effort to drive to Gainesville to watch the games when they can do so from their living rooms on television screens, with a picture that’s clearer than anybody could have ever imagined twenty years ago.
The plain and simple reality is, just coming to see the Gators play isn’t the same draw that it was during the Urban Meyer days, or even in 2015. Oh sure, there are exceptions to that statement, like if Florida is a top ten team hosting an SEC opponent, or they’re hosting a top ten team, or FSU is in town. But those are requirements for a packed Ben Hill Griffin Stadium these days, not simply additional levels of excitement to go to a game that will simply drive up the ticket prices. Even if Billy Napier turns out to be more successful than Steve Spurrier, those requirements cannot possibly be met for each and every home game- and when they’re not, and Ben Hill Griffin Stadium has thousands of empty seats, Florida loses money.
So Stricklin is deploying a business tactic here, and it’s a little derivative of his coach’s favorite saying: spending money to make money. It’s been made abundantly clear that Stricklin is going all in on this project because he doesn’t want to be in the position of “well, I really wish we’d done this or that with our last round of renovations” in 2031. So he’s shelling out the money that needs to be shelled out to essentially build a completely new stadium around the same playing field that’s sat at the corner of Gale Lemerand Drive and University Avenue for nearly a century now.
That money is expected to be in the mid nine digits- an early estimate was $400M- but most of the deliverables will make it well worth it.
A large volume of the bench seating that fans have been complaining about for years now will be replaced by chair backs. The concessions are said to be expanding greatly, with a wider selection of options. A brand new sound system is going to be installed, as will far larger video boards and better lighting throughout the stadium.
The main drawback to the renovations, though, is that the Swamp’s capacity is going to be reduced, almost certainly by over a thousand seats and possibly by several thousand. The current width of the aisles between sections violates ADA regulations, and even taking one seat out per section, per row, results in a substantial number of seats that will have to be removed from the stadium’s capacity.
And that’s just by doing the bare minimum. Previous estimates from 2021 suggested that the most dramatic possible adjustment on the table was adding two feet of width to each aisle, which would chop out nearly 18,500 seats and drop the Swamp’s capacity down to barely 70,000.
To assuage the fears some fans may have of Florida losing its magical home field environment with such a crippling decrease to its capacity, Stricklin has said in the past that he’s not really interested in reducing capacity below 75,000. So it doesn’t appear that the doomsday fear about destroying that numbers advantage with the worst possible news from a seat reduction total standpoint is a serious option.
Additionally, Florida holds 8,000 seats for visiting schools. The SEC mandates that the minimum visitors’ ticket allotment is 6,000. So Florida could reduce the capacity of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium by 2,000 seats without putting a dent in the Gator fans’ demand for tickets to any individual game- and that’s before you factor in that many visiting SEC teams are affected by the same “I’d rather watch from the comfort of my living room” attitude from their fanbase, and don’t even use up that 6,000 ticket minimum. Those unused tickets then get turned right back around and sold to Florida fans.
Thus, even if Florida winds up reducing capacity by a more middle-ground, moderate number- let’s say 3,500- the UAA could start off by reducing its visitors’ allotment by 2,000. If every single allotted ticket for the visiting team was sold, it would result in 1,500 fewer Gator fans being able to attend each game- not a bad price to pay for the improvements that are coming to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. And if even 25% of those 6,000 allotted visitors’ tickets aren’t snapped up by the other team- which is not exactly a farfetched scenario, given that this is usually the case for the majority of SEC opponents- those 1,500 tickets get turned right back over to Florida fans, meaning that the supply of Florida fans who want to see their team play in the Swamp will be wholly untouched.
It will be sad to lose the ability to declare that more than 90,000 people attended a football game in the Swamp. It marks the end of an era- and if Florida consistently sells out every home game for a period of two or three years in a row, I would personally hope that the UAA would consider tacking on a few more rows to the top of the East stands and build those numbers back. But I’d also add that even if the stadium seating reduction is a permanent one, as long as the actual number of seats removed is within reason to achieve the desired upgrades, the changes that Stricklin is orchestrating will be worth the price.
At least, the price of admission.
