Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. I certainly did, in large part because I got to do something I almost never get to do.

I took my family to a college football game and sat in the stands.

Most weeks, I’m spending college football Saturdays in my office, which is a fancy way of saying “my basement.” I can track multiple games at once there, I’m right next to my computer, and the Diet Coke in my mini-fridge doesn’t cost four bucks a can. If I’m trying to track all the action, it’s the most efficient way to do it.

But at least a few times a year, I’ll go to games in person. I love doing this, but when I’m at a stadium, I’m almost always working out of a press box. You’re somewhat insulated from the rest of the crowd, you see the field from a different perspective, your Wi-Fi mostly works…it’s still wonderful, but it’s also fundamentally different from what almost everybody else is experiencing.

I was thinking about getting a credential to cover a Northwestern home game later in the year, but my father-in-law, who works in Northwestern’s business school, told me that he had managed to secure six free tickets. Would we want to bring the whole family? Check out a game in the new lakefront stadium?

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My girls are ten and six, and had never actually been to a college football game before. What better time than now, right?

So I accepted. And instead of camping out in my office for eight hours on Saturday, we climbed to the top of the north end zone to watch the Wildcats, on the lake, in the Chicagoland sunshine.

Did this become a secret core memory? Were my children enchanted by the pageantry of college football, and are now ready to pledge themselves to a life of deep fanhood?

Nah lol. But that’s okay!

They did have fun, even though neither of my kids really has much of an interest in football beyond mascots, uniforms and whatever free stuff they could score from the stadium (Northwestern was giving away purple FIGHT FOR VICTORY flags, which I think are now hanging from a Barbie playhouse somewhere).

The kids were in love with the view of the lake…and who can blame them? With a slight breeze coming off the lake, the view from nearly anywhere in the stadium complex is distracting gorgeous. Will it be cold in mid-October? I dunno, probably. But it isn’t mid-October right now. That’s a problem for future Matt.

The views might have helped create a different sort of problem, one that I imagine many athletic departments struggle with on some level. Northwestern Medicine Field was close to packed for the first half of the game, but the actual energy in the stadium was…lacking. Part of that was probably because the game was a defensive slugfest (Northwestern won, 13-6, in a game that was tied at 3 at halftime), so there weren’t a ton of huge plays to cheer for.

But I suspect part of the other problem was that many other folks in that stadium that day weren’t there out of a deep and passionate love for either Northwestern or Miami football. Classes don’t start at Northwestern for another few weeks, so there weren’t that many students around, and I suspect we weren’t the only folks who scored free tickets through some university staff connection.

It’s great to have a packed house of folks who wanted to enjoy the sunshine, lakefront views and craft beers. But maybe it’s harder to turn that crowd into an intimidating home-field advantage?

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The tiny stadium looks amazing, but has other strengths and weaknesses as an actual football stadium

One of the nice things about having a stadium with under 20,000 seats is that with the right planning, you won’t have to wait in line for an entire quarter to use the bathrooms or grab a bite to eat. We were all surprised at not just how quickly all of us were able to grab food, but at the options. Thanks to a bunch of food trucks and temporary pop-ups, I think it’s fair to say the concession selection were substantially better than the old Ryan Field experience. For a facility that was designed and built on a crazy-fast timetable, I thought the school did an excellent job making fans feel comfortable once they were actually inside.

But when you throw up a stadium over the course of a few months, and especially in such an already packed and developed campus, there are going to be limitations.

I don’t think the place can ever be that easy to get to, seeing as the stadium is already boxed in behind a field hockey stadium, football performance center, and the business school. I’d strongly recommend that anybody planning on coming later this season to take public transportation if they can. There are shuttles that will ferry folks from various parking lots elsewhere in Evanston, but I’d expect a long walk no matter what.

I’d also expect a long wait to get through security and into the actual stadium. A boxed-in location means there just aren’t that many places where one can enter, so security bottlenecks are hard to avoid.

I’m not used to watching many football games from a north or south endzone perspective, since TV and press boxes are over the sidelines. The endzone perspective can provide a better look at anything happening deep in the red zone (which, in a 13-6 game, didn’t happen that much), but it can be much harder to track depth perception elsewhere.

Maybe I missed it somewhere, but I didn’t see a place anywhere in the stadium for a spectator to track down and distance…it wasn’t on the main video board visible to us, or on any of the ribbon boards. If you couldn’t see the sticks or hear the announcer, it was a guessing game. Same with any sort of stats or in-game updates.

But on some level, that’s part of the tradeoff when you go see a game in person. You lose some of the stats immersion, the 50-yard-line perspective, the ability to easily follow seven other games. But you get the sunshine, the cold drinks, the hot dogs, the camaraderie of your fellow spectators, and the shared experience.

My family members aren’t big football fans. They’re not going to remember that Northwestern held the Redhawks to only 40 yards rushing, or that Mike White accounted for nearly 250 yards of total offense and the game’s only touchdown. Honestly, I’m probably not going to remember that in a week.

But I’ll remember how I felt, and I’m confident they will too. And fundamentally, that’s really what college sports programs are selling. They’re in the experience business.

That was an experience I’d happily have again. Just maybe not in November.

A few other things worth mentioning…

I’ll see you in your inbox again tomorrow!