Opinion: Northwestern betrays students and players with Martin Stadium ticket policy

A sea of red just doesn’t sit right when waves of purple are ready to rise in support of Northwestern football.

When The Athletic asked coach David Braun what makes Northwestern’s temporary lakefront stadium unique back in August, Braun had a simple answer: “It’s ours.”

Braun echoed the same sentiment in his weekly Monday press-conference after losing to Indiana. “So much of the motivation behind backing this project,” he said, “was what it was going to be like for our student athletes to be able to play on campus.”

However, there is a clear dissonance between this messaging from Braun – namely that the lakeside stadium project was created for the benefit of the student athlete and student fan experience – and the reality of the Indiana game. A heavy dose of IU fans in the north and south end zones gave Northwestern Medicine Field at Martin Stadium an unmistakable crimson tilt. Jack Lausch faced a wall of guttural Indiana sound on two crucial fourth downs in the fourth quarter, and Hoosier fans in the south end zone – marketed as premium seating for Northwestern fans in the offseason – drowned out the scattered Wildcat faithful even as the Indiana lead dwindled to just three points with 11 minutes to play.

The lakefront stadium is a monumental collective achievement by the entirety of the Northwestern athletic department. It is wasted when it is not shared with the Wildcat community for whom it was built.

Away-fan invasions are not a new phenomenon in Evanston, but the red wave that overcame the lakefront feels like a genuine slap in the face to the Northwestern fanbase given the substantial number of interested Wildcat fans – specifically students and younger alumni – who were unable to gain entrance to the contest two Saturdays ago.

Martin Stadium’s student section – sections N4 and N5 behind the north end zone – is not big enough to meet the burgeoning excitement of the Northwestern student body for its resurgent football team and for the beautiful stadium that its school built on the lake. Sections N4 and N5 were packed against Indiana – packed to the point where students were sitting on stairs because there was no more space in the bleachers, and packed to the point where a stand-by line of approximately 100 purple-clad students were denied entry at kick-off.

“There was a lot of frustration because a lot of us were very excited to experience a game at this stadium,” said Macy Millones, a sophomore at Northwestern who found herself waiting in the stand-by line after arriving at the stadium at 2:30.

“The way I put it to my friends,” she added, “was we are one of the few classes of Northwestern students who will ever get to experience a football game on the lakefill.”

Millones, like many others in the line, had actually reserved a ticket to attend the game but was denied entry because she did not show up 30 minutes before kickoff. At 2:00 p.m., staff began letting in students waiting in the stand-by line who had not reserved tickets for the game. The student section reached its quota by 2:15, and students were not allowed in after.

The early arrival policy is not new to Northwestern – the same policy was in place for all of the 2023-2024 basketball season – but it is new to football as of this year.

My issue here is not with the ticket-claim system beyond a minor gripe at their messaging regarding the early arrival time. It was the first time that the ticket-claim system had been in-place for a football game, and the sole marketing ploy was an email sent to students at 3 p.m. on the Friday before the game. If Northwestern has the technology to text everyone who has ever attended a Wildcat sporting event about a white-out volleyball game, I would have used that same technology to promote the first game at the lakefront stadium with students on campus.

My frustration is that Northwestern allowed Indiana fans to color Martin Stadium red when there were hundreds of eager students who would have clamored for those seats. The stand-by line was large, but that doesn’t include students who were unable to claim tickets and did not show up to the stadium.

The crimson wave that overtook Martin Stadium against Indiana is a disservice to student-athletes whose play has merited nothing short of a raucous, purple home environment. It is also a disservice to the Northwestern students, who – for all the hand wringing as to their athletic apathy relative to their Big Ten peers – have proven time and time again they will show out in numbers for their Wildcats when given even a sliver of a product, as evidenced by the rocking Welsh-Ryan student section for the Boo Buie era of Wildcat basketball.

Students showed up in force against Indiana as well. Coach Braun applauded Wildside, Northwestern’s student section, for their strong showing at his Maryland week press conference, beaming that “those students are really starting to factor in the game with crowd noise.”

“Atmospherically it was great. People were definitely engaged, people were excited to be there. [There was] more excitement for a Northwestern football game than I’d ever felt,” said Sandy Tecotzky, a Northwestern sophomore who was among the unlucky group of students relegated to the Martin Stadium stairs.

“There was no room,” Tecotzky added, “You had to beg kids to scooch over just so you could have one thigh on the bleacher.”

To limit student access to the lakefront stadium in order to squeeze out extra cash is incredibly hard to justify with the $800 million project in progress down the road.

I was unable to get in touch with a Northwestern representative to obtain exact profit numbers for the Indiana game, so I don’t know how much Northwestern would stand to lose by expanding the student section in the future. What I do know, thanks to Medill alum Margaret Fleming from Front Office Sports, is that Northwestern is generating more revenue from the temporary lakefront facility than “in previous years with quadruple the capacity.” That’s not including the overwhelmingly positive PR Northwestern has received for the stadium’s success.

There is also the issue of Northwestern season ticket holders reselling tickets to away fans. Again, I don’t know the exact numbers here, but it is easy to infer what happened given the makeup of the crowd against Indiana.

Sections N1 and N2 were allotted for Indiana fans, and the Hoosier faithful have a knack for making their presence known. That was always going to be the case given the small capacity (just 12,000) of the temporary lakefront facility. Yet that Hoosier red bled deep into the third section of the north stands, injecting an unmistakable crimson hue to the 1,000-plus seats behind the north goalpost.

“We are high up, dead-center of N3, and we had Indiana people in front of us, Indiana people behind us,” said John Lacombe, a Northwestern alumni and co-host of the West Lot Pirates podcast covering NU athletics, “The actual numbers…were like 60-40, Northwestern or 50-50, but even that’s unacceptable.”

According to Lacombe, N3 tickets were in high demand when Northwestern released because those were some of the few seats in the stadium that could be purchased without an additional donation to the football program.

Northwestern offered tickets to fans in a tier-based system this summer, allowing donors and long-tenured season ticket holders first priority. Lacombe, who has been a season ticket holder for 16 years, had no trouble snagging his seats in N3, but he said that the tier below him – mostly made up of younger alums – was not as lucky.

“It really strains credulity for me to believe that those tickets were just out there, available for [Indiana fans],” Lacombe said, adding that reselling is not a new problem for Northwestern. As reported by Matthew Shelton from Northwestern Rivals, Northwestern men’s basketball recently instituted a policy aimed at preventing the resale of tickets for the 2024-2025 basketball season.

There is a clear fire in the student body to get into the stadium and see these games. That is a credit to both the recent success of the football team and the incredible job done by Northwestern to put the stadium together. Northwestern is missing a chance to capitalize on that momentum and to continue building on this student energy by denying entry to interested students, especially as season ticket holders are reselling tickets to opposing fans on the open market.

I don’t want to seem like I’m piling on Northwestern here. As Lacombe put it, the lakefront stadium is “in the 99th percentile of what our expectations could have been.” The fan experience once inside the stadium is excellent. The views of the lake and Chicago skyline from the north stands are without a doubt among the best in the country, and the lounge area behind the south stands – complete with food, beer and TVs showing the game – is legitimately great.

Northwestern has also shown a willingness to change and adapt its policies, as it did after Boo Buie and Co. first lit the Welsh-Ryan student section ablaze two years ago. There will be one more year of games at the lakefront facility, followed by the opening of the new Ryan Field, which, by all accounts, looks to be just an unbelievable place to watch a football game. Northwestern football just dismantled Maryland on the road as 11-point underdogs and appears to be continuing its upward trajectory under David Braun.

Northwestern football has adopted the Field of Dreams metaphor for the creation of the lakefront stadium. It is a fitting comparison for the gorgeous facility on the shores of Lake Michigan, born out of a gargantuan collective community effort.

My message to Northwestern is simple: People will come. Build it.