2019 Football Stadiums Update

This may be the quietest year yet in terms of football stadium updates. There are no new stadiums to report in the NFL as the Raiders play out a lame-duck season in Oakland before moving to Vegas next season. Boy would I have loved if Oakland gave the team the big middle finger when their lease was up. Around the league, there were some renovations, but nothing crazy. It’s the same thing at the college level, where teams stayed in their current digs and division level. Four renovations were extensive enough to note…At both Old Dominion and Coastal Carolina, their relatively recent (and pointless) move up to FBS means some expansions to their existing facility and in Norfolk, that meant nearly a complete rebuild. I said “pointless” because why do teams move from FCS to FBS? It can’t be to make money, just ask the existing colleges in the Sun Belt, MAC and Conference USA. As an FCS school, you can easily get your $1 million guarantee game, don’t need to be FBS for that. The move up also means you have no chance to compete for a national championship given the current system. That’s my biggest sticking point. So is a glorified exhibition (bowl game) that lucrative? I digress, back to stadiums…the other two big renovations come from the Pac-12 where Arizona State completed a multi-year renovation that removed 16,000 seats for premium spaces and USC began work on the Coliseum. The Trojans are seeing their historic venue go from a complete bowled stadium to one that has a box club section on a sideline. It’s probably time for that and it seems their still taking good care of the stadium’s historical nature.