The New Stanford Stadium

Ry at the new Stanford Stadium

Stanford University unveiled its new stadium on Saturday in Palo Alto, so I decided to take Ry to the game so he could be part of the history. This was supposed to include Karsyn as well, but she bailed at the last minute. Apparently college football just doesn’t have the allure with the 6-year old girl demographic that it once did.

The university had a pre-game ceremony that we missed as we tried to score a cheap ticket outside the gates. I was lucky enough to land a freebie and kids two & under are free, so we get in for the bargain price of nothing.

My first impression was that the developers did a great job with the new design. For those of you familiar with the old Stanford Stadium, you may recall the huge staircases that you had to ascend to get to the mineshaft entrances around the old bowl. Those have been replaced with tunnels which lead to an inner concourse that has concessions circling the entire stadium.

Go figure that it would take a university which is home to one of the top 5 business schools in the country, all this time to figure out that you can actually make a buck by selling $6 beers and $5 hot dogs.

Opening Kickoff

As Ry and got to our seats, two Navy F-18 Hornets go thundering overhead as a round of fireworks go off inside the stadium to christen the new joint at the completion of the national anthem. This scares the living daylights out of Ry, who immediately puckers up and begins to cry. It takes several minutes for me to calm him down, but we managed to get things under control by the time the opening kickoff.

Navy altered the happy home-opening script for the Cardinal by laying a military grade whooping during the game. Ry was ready to leave by the end of the 3rd quarter, but then a sports miracle happened.

As it turns out, the stadium had taped colored cards to the backs of each chair for one of those stadium card stunts. That typically works, when you have a capacity crowd in the stadium attempting the stunt. Stanford’s new digs had plenty of empty seats to that whole thing fizzled.

Those that did attend decided to do their aeronautical engineering homework by using those cards to design, develop and test fly giant paper airplanes. With Navy firmly in front of the Cardinal, the paper airplanes began to rain from the new upper deck.

Ryan found this to be the most interesting part of the evening and decided to join in by heaving every airplane that landed within 20 feet of us. The stands around us had cleared out, so he was free to run up and down the aisles, grabbing all the airplanes he could hold.

Future test pilot

With a mighty two-year old heave, those planes found themselves airborne once again.

When he ran out, two women decked out in their finest Stanford garb would point to a discarded plane for him to reintroduce to the atmosphere. There was one sitting right in front of him, but he failed to see it. They were pointing and urging him to look at his feet, but it just didn’t register.

“He’s Cal material”, I bellowed.

To which there was a roar from the gallery. It was the only thing these Cardinal faithful could laugh at all night.

[More Picture of the new Stadium]

[Video of the first points in stadium history]