Northwestern likes to refer to itself as Chicago’s Big Ten team. Whether you buy into that or not is up to you, but the Wildcats will be making a visit to the Windy City this fall and two more times in the next few seasons.
Illinois will move three home games against Northwestern to Soldier Field, home of the NFL’s Chicago Bears, in the coming years. Illinois announced a three-game arrangement with Soldier Field that will see Illinois play Northwestern in the NFL venue in 2015, 2017 and again in 2019. Northwestern’s scheduled home games against the Illini are still planned to be played in Evanston, Illinois. Illinois hosted Washington in Soldier Field in 2013.
“It’s exciting to seize the opportunity to further engage our incredible number of Illinois alumni and fans in the Chicagoland area with these three football games coming to Soldier Field,” Illinois Director of Athletics Mike Thomas said in a released statement from Illinois. “As the flagship university in the state we are committed to all Fighting Illini, and as part of that mindset, we will continue to bring a variety of athletics events to Chicago where we have the largest alumni base of any Big Ten institution.”
Some might say them’s fightin’ words. That’s true, but playing games in Soldier Field is something Illinois and Northwestern should embrace when possible.
Soldier Field has a capacity listed at 61,500, which is roughly 900 seats more than in Memorial Stadium in Champaign and about 14,000 more seats than Northwestern’s Ryan Field. Neither school may be a huge draw on its own, but throw them in an easy-to-get-to neutral site in a city like Chicago and the potential to sell some tickets over the Thanksgiving weekend should be intriguing. That’s the logic employed by Illinois at least.
“Ending the regular season at a historical site and one of the best stadiums in the world will make for a big-time event for our student-athletes and will be a great springboard for our football program into the postseason,” Thomas added in his statement.
This should go much more smoothly than the time Illinois and Northwestern last attempted to play a neutral site game in Chicago. That took place in historic Wrigley Field, a home game for Northwestern. That was a mitigated disaster with alternate rules needing to be put in place, like each team moving the same direction on the field out of fear of players running straight into the brick outfield wall.