I’m going to preface my post with a few comments:
- I’ve had season tickets to the Rent since it opened and have missed very few games over the years. If they were to put a Stadium on campus I personally would attend those games without question or complaint about location but that may not translate to the entire fan base.
- While I fall into the category of one who views posted speed limits more as suggestions than out and out rules, I have often been on I-91 between New Haven and Hartford, felt I was driving too slowly (in comparison to the cars passing me) only to look at the speedometer and see I was moving ~75mph-85mph.
- With the exception of a few years in the mid 1990’s my permanent residence has always been in Stamford, I currently live close to the Parkway and prior to that had lived close to I-95.
There have been a few instances (primarily when we’ve had ~15k attendance) when I’ve gotten to the Rent in an hour and maybe ten minutes. Hopefully those days are over (attendance wise) but even with a full house (we have had those in the past) if the plan is to arrive with sufficient time to tailgate, the worst case scenario would be an hour and a half. Having attended plenty of men’s basketball games at Gampel over the past nearly three and a half decades, where likely a third of the vehicles that would travel to a football game would be going to Gampel, there is no way in hell that the time difference would be only twenty minutes. With the current infrastructure, an additional hour each way would be a very conservative estimate. Hell, going to a men’s basketball game on a weekend (weekday games are no longer feasible for me unless I’m willing to take two vacation days; game day & day after) for the privilege (at a time of year when days off are never a good idea in my field) it requires an additional hour each way due to traffic approaching the campus, again with likely one third the amount of vehicles approaching the school.
When the perceived support of the program over the first few years after the announcement that we were moving up to (then called) division 1-A football there couldn’t have been a better location than the Rent. Prior to the last half of the last season at Memorial it didn’t appear likely that we could put a presentable product on the field for years, if ever, so that we were able to fill (or almost fill) the Rent from day one was a monumental accomplishment. I am fully aware of the stories of the last few miles approaching Beaver Stadium (Penn St) along with the similar traffic jams that fans of other major college football programs endure. At the time the Rent opened (twenty years ago), with the size of our then dedicated fan base, we would have been lucky to break 10k in attendance if the Rent didn’t have the central location and convenience of highways approaching the stadium (more than sufficient tailgating space surrounding the stadium was an added bonus, people should see what some fan bases need to deal with when it comes to this).
We can add that the sightlines are incredible in comparison to may classic (older) stadiums and unlike some, we haven’t had expansions that included decreasing ‘seat size’ in bleachers from 12” to 10” to 8” to 7” to 6” (yes, there are a handful of stadiums where if you have a bleacher type seat with your season tickets you will be required to stand basically sideways if there is full attendance in your section).
The ‘difficulties’ that many fan bases have been willing to endure as part of the ‘traditional’ on campus, college football game day experience are among things that would have limited our (then) neophyte fan base tremendously as it would have alienated two thirds of them. If we reach the point where our attendance is consistent enough that we can believe the entirety would have zero problem relocating to Storrs, then the idea of an on campus stadium would make a ton of sense. Until then, we will be fine at the Rent.
