I agree with your point, for sure, but my fix which I have been quite adamant about is to completely remove (what I see as) useless capacity under the East Balcony and to redistribute that capacity to the Horseshoe. Something like this as a fix to make it more symmetrical to the west side:
Current Design
View attachment 30761
Walling Off Seats Under East Balcony to Match West
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Believe it or not, I saw someone post once that we have as many as
7,000 seats underneath the East Balcony. You could redistribute all of that to the Horseshoe and not add a single seat to our total capacity, while making the Horseshoe structure a MUCH more imposing and aesthetically pleasing area of the stadium. One of the weirdest things about Memorial Stadium is that we actually manage to make a lot of seats look like not that many by the way it's laid out. Again, for reference from my post earlier in the thread, both of these sections have around 10,000 seats in them...
Illinois' Horseshoe
Iowa's North End Zone
The goal/trend is to have as big of a structure as possible that doesn't add that much to your capacity ... we have VERY much the opposite with the Horseshoe, haha. I hate the Hawkeyes as much as the next guy, but it's breathtakingly annoying how much more effectively they distribute 10k seats in the same area of their stadium compared to what we have. I think the ultimate plan should be:
1) Remove all seats underneath the East Balcony so it matches the west side ---> capacity reduced to 53k
2) Demolish the Horseshoe --> capacity reduced further to 43k
3) Build a truly impressive structure in the South Endzone that incorporates Memorial Stadium's beautiful architecture and helps to enclose the noise, let's say a structure that has like 12k seats ---> final capacity of 55k
For reference, every single one of our Saturday home games last year except for Northwestern would have been over 90% capacity, and we would have had three games over 95% (and MSU last year would have been well over a sellout).
TL;DR
So I think 55k or so is actually an appropriate capacity for us, so I DEFINITELY agree with you that we should not be adding (net) seats. My issue is more with how inefficiently our capacity is spread out.