Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, minutes before Florida kicked off against Alabama in 2021. (Photo taken by Neil Shulman, In All Kinds Of Weather.)
The Florida Gators’ athletic department has had its eye on renovating its famed football stadium, Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, for quite some time now. Today, a new update was teased. And the end result figures to be one of the premiere stadiums in college football in more ways than just its history.
Florida Athletic Director Scott Stricklin went on SportScene with Steve Russell and had this to say: “It’s probably going to be by far the most ambitious facility project not only that the University of Florida has done from an athletic standpoint, but it might be the biggest in SEC history, maybe even as big as any nationally.”
How much will it cost? “My guess,” Stricklin remarked, “to fully renovate the Swamp you’re looking at a few hundred million dollars.”
For all the flak that’s been thrown at Stricklin for his bad hires and subsequent mismanagement of coaches, (most notably women’s basketball coach Cam Newbauer and women’s soccer Tony Amato, each of whom was fired for various forms of abuse) we’ve all got to come together and give him credit where it’s due. He’s an excellent fundraiser, and he places heavy emphasis on facilities. The new Ben Hill Griffin Stadium will begin construction on the heels of a new $85 million practice facility and a brand new, much nicer baseball park.
The upgrades will happen in phases. Various components to the construction will include reconfiguration of office space and a weight room within the stadium confines. Stricklin also teased the idea of rolling some other features out first, such as special lights or audio or new video boards.
There’s little debate that upgrades to the Swamp are needed. Hard bench seating is not conducive to older fans who have been coming to games for years continuing to do so, nor are the fairly narrow sets of stairs. The question now becomes: how many seats are going to need to be sacrificed for this?
Well, here are the areas of the Swamp that the UAA apparently deem to be priorities:
Ben Hill Griffin Stadium Seating Bowl
The stadium seating bowl improvements will provide upgrades to the access aisles by increasing the width and adding handrails, seating upgrades to include replacement of bench seats with chairbacks and bench seats width adjustments, and concrete restoration. The scoreboards and sound systems will also be upgraded.
East and South Concourses
The east and south concourse areas will be upgraded.
South Endzone
The south endzone will be studied for potential renovations to include a Club area and/or Loge Boxes.
According to the UF document detailing the plans, it feels like a ton of different scenarios are being considered in terms of the number of seats that will actually be taken out. The wildest proposed scenario featured the removal of over 18,000 seats, which would reduce the capacity of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium to just a hair above 70,000. This proposal would see aisle width increase by a full foot, and the width of every single seat increase by a whopping two feet.
I feel confident in saying that isn’t going to happen. There’s being ADA compliant, and then there’s overcorrecting in the form of widening the seats to the point where they can fit a buffalo. This sort of proposal falls comfortably in the latter category.
But even the least dramatic proposal calls for the removal of a little over 2,000 seats, and given Stricklin’s desire to make adjustments that last for 75 years and not 15, it feels probable that the adjustments that will be made to the seat and aisle width will be more than just the bare minimum. That means that, unless Stricklin or a future AD wants to build more rows up even higher off the ground, the Swamp is in its final days of being able to declare that 90,000+ fans came to watch a football game. So the most likely scenario falls in between those extremes, which would result in a decreased stadium capacity of somewhere between 70,000 and 86,500– and probably not within a few hundred of either of those extremes.
It’s not too late to experience Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in its greatest ever fashion from a capacity standpoint. The renovations will not begin until next offseason at the earliest, and Florida welcomes both Tennessee and FSU to the Swamp this year. So if you’d like to be part of a 90,000+ crowd at a Florida Gators football game, you still have this season- at least.
On the other hand, we’re not far away from the point when we can experience Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in its greatest ever fashion. Period.