COLUMBUS – Ohio State will spend $42 million to shore up part of Ohio Stadium, improve the experience for fans with obstructed view seats, add more luxury seating, and make other upgrades while reducing the seating capacity inside the 94-year-old stadium.
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Athletic director Gene Smith announced on Tuesday that work on the four-year project will begin in 2017.
It will be funded by the athletic department, without use of any state tax or student tuition money, Smith said. The stadium got a $194 million makeover in 2001.
The project includes restoring concrete on C Deck, installing better scoreboards and larger TVs to improve some obstructed-view seats on B Deck and adding 35 loge boxes and 12 luxury suites.
The restoration and re-coating of the 94-year old concrete on C Deck will take place in phases between 2017 and 2020. The project also includes improvements to the power distribution systems for the east, west and south stands.
The work requires removal of 2,600 seats, reducing capacity to 102,854, which is still an overall gain of 525 seats over the capacity prior to an expansion to seating in the south stands in 2014. Smith says most of the seats lost will be in sections of B Deck with obstructed or “less than ideal” views.
Ohio Stadium will remain the third-largest college football stadium in the country behind Michigan Stadium (107,601) and Penn State’s Beaver Stadium (106,572) even as its capacity drops from 104,944 (reached in 2014 with the expansion of the south stands) to 102,854 when the new project is completed in 2020. That would keep it just ahead of Texas A&M’s Kyle Field (102,733), but Smith said the capacity race is no longer a priority.
“We’re comfortable where we are” in that pecking order, Smith said Tuesday in announcing what will be a “multiple-phase, multi-year project … for our 94-year-old stadium.”
If approved by the OSU Board of Trustees, the project will begin in early 2017 and be completed in time for the 2020 football season. It will be done in phases, with the biggest crunch coming in the 2018 and 2019 seasons, when 2,600 seats will be removed in the northwest section of B deck to make way for the luxury suites — which will be stacked in twos like the present suites on that level — and the four-seat loges.