You walk into Camp Randall Stadium these days and I swear it feels like a museum piece compared to what it used to be. All that new video board and the fancy club seats and the suites they keep adding, it is nice and all but it does not feel like the place I grew up watching games. I remember sitting in the old south end zone bleachers back in 1982, the metal benches so cold you could feel it through three pairs of pants, and we packed in there like sardines just to watch us get pounded by Michigan State. Nobody complained about the amenities because we were there for the football and the football was honest.
The old stadium had character. You could hear the band warming up from the parking lot and smell the brats cooking from a mile away. Now you got these luxury boxes full of people who show up halfway through the first quarter because they were sipping cocktails somewhere. I remember the 1990 game against Illinois when we finally turned the corner under Barry Alvarez, the place was shaking so hard I thought the upper deck was gonna collapse. That was real noise. Not this piped in stuff they try to do now when the crowd gets quiet becausse the play took too long to develop.
What gets me is how they keep ripping out the history to put in more places to sell overpriced beer. The old weight room underneath the stadium, the one where players used to train in the 80s when we were still trying to figure out if we could even compete in the Big Ten, that is gone now. Replaced with some state of the art facility that costs more than my house. And the kids still transfer out the first chance they get. Makes you wonder what the point of all that concrete and steel really is when the loyalty left with the 1998 Rose Bowl team.
I will always love that stadium because it is where we built something from nothing. But I miss when it felt like a football field instead of a shopping mall with goalposts.