Can part of this reseat be putting the visiting fans in the balcony and moving the students out of their noise-free prison pen in the sky?!
@IlliniInBuckeyeState I would defer to you if you have better capacity numbers by section, but I love desperately trying to figure out any way possible that we could get the students out of the NEZ and get them in that 107-109 stretch so I am going off of Wikipedia and simple math for now!
1. The NEZ holds 5,000. I know we have some overflow student seating in 101 or whatever, but I don't know how that works so I will assume we are relocating 5,000 students.
2. East Main is said to hold 18,000. Assuming the same number per section, that would be 2,000 seats in each.
3. East Balcony is said to hold 10,000. The same equal distribution would have 1,111 per section.
1. So first move is to move the 2,000 visiting fans in 109 to the East Balcony. That would roughly take up 208 and 209. There's 2,000 seats for the students in 109 without a single Illini ticketholder affected.
2. It looks like 107 and 108 are considered "Sideline" seats and not "Prime" like 104-106. So I think you could AT LEAST find a way to get 2,000 more students into 108. It might take some creativity and you'll hear some complaints from someone no matter what ... but this is just a fairly small price to pay for a much, much better home field advantage. And again ... we were doing this for decades before RG ruined it! Let's not act like it's a brand new idea.
3. If we cannot get into 107 (which I could understand), put the remaining students in 110-113 of the Horseshoe. Those are simultaneously the closest Horseshoe seats to the field of play while also being the worst angles.
4. If there is need for additional student overflow, sell the tickets as you would normally but for 207 in the East Balcony, pinning the visiting fans in between our students and a brick wall ... Memorial Stadium is supposed to be intimidating, lol.
5. Revamp the NEZ as a family-friendly area that includes some type of food/drink deal with tickets in a way that makes the DIA money. We have had multiple people here say that these are actually great seats to watch a game ... they're just awful for students.
