How Michigan built the Big House, a symbol of college football controversy and lore

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Before the first scoop of dirt was raised from the farmstead where Michigan Stadium was built, controversy was brewing about the professionalization of college sports.

By 1926, Michigan’s football program had outgrown Ferry Field, where big games prompted far more demand than the 42,000-seat stadium could accommodate. Fielding Yost, Michigan’s athletic director and the coach of the famous “Point-a-Minute” teams that dominated college football in the early 1900s, was the chief advocate for building a new stadium, just as many of Michigan’s competitors had done.

Yost’s proposals sparked mixed reactions from the campus community. Many supported the idea, but some faculty members protested that a bigger stadium would deepen the divide between football and the university’s academic mission. In a victory for Yost, a faculty committee issued a report that generally endorsed his view that intercollegiate athletics could contribute to a thriving campus. The report also raised a note of caution about the win-at-all-costs culture that could arise as football became more popular.

“One of the most serious difficulties in intercollegiate football at the present time is the insistence of the alumni upon winning teams,” the report said, as recounted in Robert Soderstrom’s book “The Big House: Fielding Yost and the Building of Michigan Stadium.” “Efforts must be made to keep alumni opinion essentially sane and conservative in matters of athletic policy. Excessive and unwise publicity is a general evil.”

Today, there’s no greater spectacle on Michigan’s campus than a big game at the Big House. Michigan Stadium will be the center of the college football world Saturday as Fox’s “Big Noon Kickoff,” ESPN’s “College Gameday” and upward of 110,000 fans converge on Ann Arbor for a matchup between No. 4 Texas and No. 9 Michigan, one of the first Big Ten-SEC showdowns since both mega-conferences expanded. It’s also one of the biggest nonconference games in the storied stadium’s history: The Longhorns are the first non-Big Ten team ranked in the AP top five to visit Michigan Stadium since Florida State in 1991.

Top-10 nonconference visitors

Year	Team	Result
2019		W, 45-14
1997		W, 27-3 Advertisement
1994		L, 27-26
1991		L, 51-31
1991 Advertisement		W, 24-14
1989		L, 24-19
1988		L, 31-30 Advertisement
1984		W, 22-14
1981		W, 25-7
1979 Advertisement		L, 12-10
1977		W, 41-3
1975		W, 31-7 Advertisement

Since 1970

The 2024 season is a groundbreaking one for Michigan and college football as a whole, as the reigning national champions enter the era of the 12-team College Football Playoff with a new head coach in Sherrone Moore. NIL has altered the economic landscape of the sport, and revenue sharing with athletes is right around the corner. The debate that raged on Michigan’s campus in the 1920s never really ended; it only got louder.

“What will a larger stadium mean? It will only mean greater Roman holidays than we now have,” professor Robert C. Angell wrote in the Michigan Daily in 1925. “The players themselves will be forced into even more rigorous training than they are now subjected to. We have spring football now; we will have winter football soon. These men will think and act football the year round.”

The history of Michigan Stadium is, in some ways, a history of college football’s tug-of-war between innovation and tradition. The stadium opened in 1927 with temporary bleachers that increased capacity to 85,000, making it the largest college-owned stadium in the country. To pay for it, Michigan issued 3,000 bonds to the community at $500 apiece.

Many of the stadium’s seats sat empty during the Great Depression, but the end of World War II brought renewed enthusiasm for college football. Fritz Crisler, coach of the undefeated “Mad Magicians” of 1947, succeeded Yost as athletic director and oversaw two expansions that pushed Michigan Stadium’s capacity past 100,000.

Crisler, the man who introduced platoon football and the winged helmet, was both a forward-thinker and a traditionalist. Before he went to the University of Chicago and played for Amos Alonzo Stagg, Crisler thought about becoming a pastor, his grandson said. He found a different calling as a coach and athletic director but retained a spiritual outlook on the value of football.

“My recollection is, although he thought winning was important and he wanted to win, it was not the main focus of what athletics were to him,” said Crisler’s grandson, F. Adams Crisler. “He always thought in terms of, at least as he told me, the mind, body and spirit of an athlete.”

In 1956, Crisler oversaw the construction of a new press box and additional seating that raised the stadium capacity to 101,001. The final digit was not a mistake: According to newspaper reports at the time, Crisler initially intended capacity to be 100,001, with a mysterious extra seat tucked away somewhere in the stadium.

“It has its spot,” Crisler told Sports Illustrated in 1963. “And I am the only man who knows where that spot is.”

Many theories have been offered about the location and the significance of the extra seat. Some claimed it was set aside for Stagg, Crisler’s coach. Others said it was dedicated to Yost, who died in 1946, or reserved for Crisler himself. As a child, Adams Crisler climbed a ladder to the roof of the press box and surveyed the entire stadium, hoping to spot the seat in some hidden location. He never found it, and his grandfather never gave him any clues.

“You’ve just got to find it,” Adams Crisler recalled his grandfather saying. “When you think you find it, you let me know.”

As a student at Michigan, Adams Crisler had a summer job replacing the stadium’s concrete steps. He held out hope the crew would discover a lone seat hidden in some secret passageway, but no such seat was found. Since then, Adams Crisler has been agnostic about the existence of the seat, though he appreciates its place in Michigan Stadium lore.

“It captivated imaginations,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there was that seat, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t.”

The stadium’s seating capacity, now listed at 107,601, has fluctuated through the years, but the “01” remains as a nod to Crisler’s famous seat. It’s one of those traditions, like announcing the Slippery Rock score or players touching the M Club banner, that has weathered decades of change to both the sport and the stadium.

Don Canham, who succeeded Crisler as athletic director, is widely credited with marketing Michigan football to the masses and ushering in a new era of commercial success that coincided with Bo Schembechler’s tenure as coach. After years of sagging attendance, the stands were full again in the 1970s and 1980s. ABC broadcaster Keith Jackson, the voice of college football for generations, popularized a nickname that stuck: The Big House.

“This is no doubt my favorite place, to see four generations rise up and appreciate it, for the pageantry, the ambience,” Jackson told The New York Times before a 1998 game at Michigan Stadium, where the band feted the broadcaster, who had been planning to retire, by spelling out “THANKS KEITH” on the field. “Michigan has such grandiosity.”

The purity and pageantry of college football have always existed in an awkward embrace with the commercial side of the sport. Both aspects will be front and center in 2024 as teams like Texas and Michigan, representatives of college football’s super conferences, compete for spots in the expanded CFP.

The Wolverines will play Big Ten games against USC, Washington and Oregon and could host a Playoff game at Michigan Stadium for the first time in school history. The Ohio State rivalry, still in its customary spot on the final Saturday of the regular season, could be repeated a week later if both teams make the Big Ten championship game. And in a development that might have horrified Fritz Crisler, fans can now buy beer at Michigan Stadium.

“He was one that was not that crazy about pro football or commercialism in sports,” Adams Crisler said. “He made a comment that the purpose of pro football was to sell beer. He greatly disliked beer, so he didn’t have a lot of use for the pro game.”

Even so, Adams Crisler thinks his grandfather would be proud to see Michigan Stadium as it stands today. Especially one part of it: the new signs beneath the video boards celebrating the 2023 CFP championship.

“He would have loved to see this last year’s national championship team and the kind of precision they had and the types of plays that they used,” Adams Crisler said. “He would have been amazed and happy with it.”

(Top photo: Aaron J. Thornton / Getty Images)