To Northwestern football, 'home-field advantage' must sound like a foreign language

Here’s the thing about the new Ryan Field, which is scheduled to open in time for Northwestern’s 2026 football season: Not only is it the biggest college stadium project ever, with an estimated price tag of $850 million, but it’s also going to be — excitement alert — the best college stadium ever.

But don’t take my word for it. Just ask Northwestern.

‘‘The best stadium in the world for student-athletes and fans anywhere,’’ university president Michael Schill boasted during the summer.

‘‘The best stadium in all of college football,’’ coach David Braun has promised several times, most recently this week.

‘‘The best stadium in college sports,’’ new athletic director Mark Jackson weighed in as part of a publicity package about the mostly privately funded stadium project that was released by the school Monday.

Great, that’s settled.

But will fans of the Wildcats routinely fill even a 35,000-seat venue — tiny by Big Ten standards — on future Saturdays? Will the purple seats be taken by real, live, purple-clad humans? Will Northwestern football ever experience what so many other schools take for granted, an actual home-field advantage?

That’s what I want to know. Electric game-day atmospheres in Evanston where supporters of visiting teams are drowned out by Cats crazies is a scenario I still struggle to wrap my imagination around.

‘‘The hope is we will pack it with purple,’’ Jackson said by phone Tuesday. ‘‘That will be our first priority. But the only remedy is to put the kind of product on the field where demand for Northwestern folks is so high, they’d never give up a ticket. . . .

‘‘If it’s not all purple, though, and whether it’s the visiting team or the corporate communities of Chicago and Evanston that fill those seats, that’s a win for us, too.’’

The timing of the new Ryan Field publicity campaign is a bit funny, considering Northwestern just lost a game at Wrigley Field, where the box seats, grandstands and bleachers were so packed with Ohio State fans that seemingly every Buckeyes writer in attendance led their story with it.

Cleveland.com’s game story mentioned the pro-Ohio State crowd in the second sentence. The Columbus Dispatch game story did, too, referring to Wrigley as the Buckeyes’ ‘‘friendly confines.’’ Another Ohio scribe mockingly put ‘‘home’’ game in quotes — officially, it was a home game for Northwestern — and estimated 90% of the crowd of 38,000 was cheering for the wrong team.

It was admittedly an extreme version of a scene many of us have witnessed countless times before: a Northwestern home game where the Wildcats weren’t the main attraction. For too long to remember, the old Ryan Field played host to that unfortunate reality.

You’d better believe it makes a competitive difference and always has.

‘‘We felt it as the buses were going around the stadium,’’ Buckeyes coach Ryan Day said. ‘‘You’re driving through [and] see all this red and scarlet. . . . People were fired up, and so it got us kind of fired up, too. We said early on we wanted to give them something to get fired up about.’’

In 2023, the last season at old Ryan Field, average announced attendance barely scraped above 20,000, ranking 93rd in the FBS ranks, the lowest among all power-conference schools and around half the 40,000 figure at Maryland, which was next-lowest on the Big Ten list. This season — as the next one will — brought home games at a pop-up stadium on campus where roughly 12,000 spectators could squeeze in. And those figures often, if not typically, included more fans of the other guys.

Braun’s team plays Saturday at Michigan, the biggest stadium in the land, where more than 100,000 will be on hand — and that’s just counting the Maize and Blue types. Braun claims that football in any environment is ‘‘all the same’’ after the opening kickoff, but that’s an awfully tough sell. Speaking of tough sells, is a 35,000-seat stadium really going to measure up on the ‘‘best’’ list to the 100,000-plus cathedrals at Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State? My imagination is struggling again.

I asked Braun whether he envisions a time when Northwestern has moved beyond playing home games that look like road games.

‘‘I will look forward to answering that question directly when we’re putting eight-, nine-, 10-win seasons together,’’ he said. ‘‘And when we’re doing that, our fan base better be the dominant fan base in showing up and showing up with a ton of passion. . . . When we get to that point, if they’re not showing up the right way, then it’s an opportunity for me to challenge our fan base. But right now, those that are with us, I appreciate them greatly.’’

Northwestern has enrollment challenges, admissions challenges, NIL challenges and the never-ending challenge of trying to reach beyond campus and the alumni base to attract support in a market that’s all about pro sports. It has benefactors in the Ryans, who are taking a sizable risk with this stadium, no matter how much they have stuffed under their mattresses and in their piggy banks.

According to Northwestern, the ‘‘sports and entertainment’’ venue will have more than 200,000 square feet of parks and plazas surrounding the stadium and will offer ‘‘better-than-TV’’ views from all 35,000 seats. All of it surely will be impressive to behold.

There also are the stadium’s ‘‘seating canopy’’ features that, judging by Northwestern’s enthusiasm about them, might be the keys to the whole operation. The canopies are, the school wrote, ‘‘specifically engineered to create a powerful home-field sound advantage at games.’’

You know what else creates a powerful sound? A home crowd that cares. Fans of other college teams have been doing it for decades, with no engineering necessary.