I don't know when it really ended but in those early 90's games, I remember large portions of the crowd stomping on the old metal bleachers at critical junctures. That helped to add to an extremely loud environment.
Honestly, I know I harp on this way too much, but we are seriously doing ourselves no favors by putting the students in the NEZ structure. They are in a spot where the sound effects are honestly just really weird, and both their noise AND the noise from the marching Illini gets too filtered in the wind. When we came down for the (infuriating) Purdue game in 2022, Purdue brought both a decent number of fans and its band. We sat in West Main, theoretically equidistant between the Purdue fans/band in the visitors section in East Main and our student section/band in the NEZ ... and Purdue was SO much louder for its numbers, simply because the sound was echoing off of the brick tower to their left and balcony above them. Meanwhile, the Illini students and Marching Illini sounded like they were both about a half mile away. It's mind boggling why we chose to set things up like this.
The 80’s belong to the Illini
Yea, Iowa looks like they've got fans right on top of the field. Similar to Autzen. Looks intimidating. One of my favorite Autzen noise stories was when UCLA received the kickoff and started at their own 20. Two plays later they were at the 10 due to illegal movement on the line thanks to crowd noise. The UCLA QB turned to the crowd and gave them the single finger salute. Note: This WAS NOT in front of the student section, point is it's the whole crowd.This is similar to the setup at Iowa, where you feel like the fans are breathing down your neck ... and the comparison to Illinois with similar photos really drives the point home that we are fighting a bit of an uphill battle in this regard! I don't think Iowa's wall to elevate the first row is as high as Oregon's, but it still accomplishes its goal, IMO. You should consider yourself lucky, because until we get a MAJOR renovation, this is always going to be a problem with our stadium. I tried to find two sets of photos of Illini/Iowa comparisons from similar angles:
Just crazy how much more wasted space we have in there than they do. It's kind of difficult to see in the third photo above, but we literally don't let fans sit in the first couple rows behind the players (even when we have a sellout!) because they wouldn't be able to see ... that is a very lame problem to have, haha. As you can also see in the edited photo below, where our track USED TO be really kind of screws us these days ... and as others have mentioned here before, I am not sure how we fix this issue without lowering the field:
