Agitated Sooner Nation Sounds Off Again, This Time About the New Stadium Setup

OU fans are not happy about the forthcoming configuration of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.

So naturally, Sooner Nation took to social media to voice their displeasure — for the second time this week.

This time, it’s not about the color of the team’s alternate uniform or not being able to read jersey numbers or missing player names.

This time, OU fans are steamed about the school’s announcement Friday that, among its long-overdue, $450 million renovation of the west side of the stadium, they’re going to lose some 7,000 total seats in the process.

This is a two-pronged problem.

On one side, some fans will be out of a season ticket — either because they will be caught in a literal numbers crunch, or because they won’t want to pay even higher prices for the same seat (or an inferior seat) when the project is completed in time for the 2029 football season.

On the other side, OU’s new estimated projected capacity will be around 74,000 — ahead of Arkansas (72,000), Ole Miss (64,038), Missouri (61,620), Kentucky (61,000), Mississippi State (60,311) and Vanderbilt (40,500), and 10th among the 16-team Southeastern Conference.

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In the SEC, home field advantage is an enormous edge. Visiting teams’ offenses can get swallowed up by the cacophony of chaos. The noise can disrupt game plans and intimidate players.

But starting in 2029, OU’s official capacity will drop another spot in the rankings. Fewer seats means fewer fans. Fewer fans means less noise.

Castiglione mentioned the possibility of adding seats back in the future, when the north end of the stadium is finally expanded. Fans say amenities there are badly lagging but, in an uncertain economic environment, how long will that be? Ten years? Twenty? More?

Castiglione doesn’t like empty seats, and although OU claims a consecutive sellout streak of 164 games, everyone knows there are always seats available. The OU students’ long history of checking out at halftime has generally been curbed in some high-profile SEC games, but the corners of the upper decks remain sparsely populated. Those empty seats look bad on TV.

That’s one reason why, even when Bob Stoops had the Crimson and Cream Express rolling to championships and important bowl games, Castiglione always kept a season ticket wait list of about 10,000.

Now, with prices higher than ever and every game on TV (and TV’s so huge) that list has shrunk as more and more fans choose to stay home. The Sooners' win-loss total under Brent Venables (30-19) has turned some fans away, too, although at 8-2 and No. 8 in this week's College Football Playoff rankings ahead of Saturday morning's game against No. 22 Missouri, that seems to be trending up.

Friday’s press release also confirmed the addition of 4,000 new club seats among the new luxury suites and loge sections. But the new 74,000 capacity includes those, meaning 11,000 seats will be removed, then 4,000 club seats will be added back. There's also 47 suites and 64 loge boxes.

Generally speaking, removing regular seats — fans responding on Twitter/X referred to themselves as "average fans" — to add posh luxury accommodations means trading the standing, screaming, arm-waving fans for the suite life crowd who prefers to sit and chat or just chill and enjoy a beverage while the game unfolds — again, less noise for visiting teams to fear.

It’s not known to what degree OU fans in general or season-ticket holders in particular were consulted. But judging by the response on Twitter/X, Facebook and on message boards, they were not.

But the OU administration seems less focused on how many fans are in the stadium and more focused on how much those fans are paying to get in.

Athletic director Joe Castiglione told George Stoia on campus Friday that projections show OU will earn more revenue from this setup (74,000 with more premium seating) than they do from the current iteration (81,000 with less premium seating).

"The revenue that's coming from all of this is actually stronger than the revenue that we have coming out of the stadium right now,” Castiglione said.

That’s the new era of NIL and revenue sharing, where players are recruited out of high school and the transfer portal with the promise of big dollars, competitive dollars. They might work hard and develop into an All-American, or they might sign a million-dollar deal and then check out and never see the field — or anything in between.

Someone has to pay. And if NIL donations aren't enough, ticket prices (and the cost of luxury suites) will keep going up.

“We didn't start out thinking we were going to reduce the capacity at all,” Castiglione said, “but to try and make this all work within the space allowance, we have to elevate the experience, to create these new premium areas, to improve and expand concourse areas, to get chair backs — which people want, the existing structure, all of those things — we knew at some point as we worked through the design, we were going to lose some seats in the process — in this phase.

“But part of our study also included market trends and fan behavior and ticket demand and ticket pricing. All of those kinds of things all rolled up into the thought process as well. So when we were weighing both, you have to think about the cost benefit.

“But in the future, we're going to have another phase which could increase the seating capacity by whatever number we think is meeting or reaching the demand that we can project for game days. And so there's a chance for the stadium capacity to go up. Remember, (when) we started this, the capacity went up — a lot. We said at the time it would. And then as we move through the various phases, we said the seating capacity would get altered as we rebuilt the stadium, and then we would land back on a seating capacity that was, candidly, right in line with what the demand is, the growth of our program, the population of the state and region.

“We look at those ticket demands, we don't just measure it on how the stadium looks on a gameday with top-five matchup, but how it looks every gameday. And you look around the country, and there are a lot of stadiums that probably would be considered as overbuilt, and so now they're looking at ways to try to reduce the capacity. I want to say again, that was not our goal. That's just the outgrowth of having to create the elevated experience.”

Here’s a sampling from Twitter of what Sooner Nation thinks about it: