Rice Stadium

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Rice Stadium

Location	Stadium Rd. Houston, TX 77005
Broke ground	February, 1950
Opened	September 30, 1950
Owner	Rice University
Operator	Rice University
Surface	FieldTurf
Architect	Brown & Root Constructors
Tenants
Rice University Owls (football) Houston Oilers (NFL) (1965-1967)
Capacity
70,000

Rice Stadium is a football stadium located on the Rice University campus in Houston, Texas. Completed in 1950, the stadium seats 72,000 in a lower bowl and upper decks on each sideline. The stadium is the home of the Rice University football team.

Architecturally, Rice Stadium is an excellent example of modernism, with simple lines and an unadorned, functional design. The entire lower seating bowl is located below the surrounding ground level. Built solely for football, the stadium has excellent sightlines from almost every seat.

In 2006, Rice University upgraded the facility by switching from AstroTurf to FieldTurf and adding a modern scoreboard above the north concourse. ^[1] Seating in the upper deck is in poor condition, which led the university to move home games for which large crowds were expected to nearby Reliant Stadium.

Rice Stadium can also be used as a concert venue, seating 80,000 spectators.

1 History and trivia
2 John F. Kennedy speech
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] History and trivia

The current Rice Stadium replaced Old Rice Stadium, which was located where the Rice Track/Soccer Stadium is today. The older stadium seated less than 37,000 fans.

In addition to Rice, the University of Houston football team played at Rice Stadium from 1951 to 1965, and the Bluebonnet Bowl was played there from 1959 to 1967 and again in 1985 and 1986.

Rice Stadium was built before professional football came to Houston, and 70,000 fans might be expected to attend a college football game there. But the Houston Oilers arrived in 1960 (they themselves played in the stadium from 1965 to 1967), Rice football stopped being competitive in the Southwest Conference after 1961, and the stadium has not sold out for a college football game since the early 1960s (the average attendance for Rice football games in Rice Stadium in 2005 was 10,072).

In 1974, Rice Stadium hosted Super Bowl VIII, in which the Miami Dolphins beat the Minnesota Vikings 24-7.

Rice Stadium is large enough to seat every alumnus of Rice University, living and dead.

Although the stadium has hosted a number of bowl games, promoters have resisted the temptation to call any of them "The Rice Bowl".

Rice Stadium in 2005, before its 2006 renovations

In 1994, Pink Floyd had to cancel a show half way through due to heavy rainfall that night.

[edit] John F. Kennedy speech

On September 12, 1962, Rice Stadium hosted the speech in which President John F. Kennedy challenged Americans to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. In the speech, he used a reference to Rice University football to help frame his rhetoric:

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.