Pat Ryan Jr., Northwestern’s Stadium Prince, Polishes the New Family Jewel

EVANSTON, Ill. — It’s just after 8 a.m. on a bright blue morning earlier this month, and Pat Ryan Jr. is greeting yet another reporter in a conference room inside Welsh-Ryan Arena, the Northwestern University basketball venue named—like so much else on NU’s suburban Chicago campus—for his family.

Over the last year, this particular room has operated as the holding pen for tours of the new Ryan Field, Northwestern’s state-of-the-art $875 million football stadium, principally funded by Ryan’s billionaire father, Pat Ryan Sr., and shepherded by his namesake through the family’s sports investment arm.

Upon completion, Ryan Field will have the dual distinction of being the most expensive and the smallest stadium, by seating capacity, in all of big-time college football. In this and other ways, it is a monument to unlikely contrasts.

A model of the stadium sits in the center of the room, which Ryan Jr. half-jokingly refers to as his office. There are plastic boxes overflowing with personal protective equipment, televisions cued to videos and architectural renderings, and a mini fridge full of refreshments. Ryan opens it, grabs a Diet Coke and asks one of his assistants to summon a cup of ice.

He is dressed in a version of what has become his standard professional mufti of the last few years: a blue-and-white checked dress shirt, Ray-Ban sunglasses, hiking boots and a yellow reflective safety vest.

On this day—Sept. 11, of all days—the calendar marks a three-week countdown to the stadium’s public opening, when Northwestern football is scheduled to host Penn State. The Wildcats thumped Colorado last Saturday in their final game at the makeshift facility, banked along Lake Michigan, that has served as the team’s temporary home for the last two years.

Ryan’s goal at this point is keeping everything on track for the Oct. 2 delivery date, both on the construction site and in the court of public opinion.

He spends almost every day here, commuting north to Evanston, Ill., from his home in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood. By his estimate, he has led well over 100 tours of the construction site for media outlets, and he is nothing if not rehearsed. Yet the repetition—especially of the word “experience”—has done little to dull his enthusiasm.

“This is a building that will look like no other building you’ve seen, and that’s because we built around experience,” Ryan said, a line he no doubt has delivered many times before, but that he still utters with a sense of earnest revelation. “We made very bold bets that are different, mostly because you do this only once every 100 years, and so we definitely have a point of view on what fans will want and how to create a great experience. And people will either look at this and say, “Oh, we love that,’ and you’ll see elements [copied] in other stadiums. And if we’re wrong, then we’ll be the only one.”

Over the course of two hours, Ryan inevitably hits his marks—likening old college football stadiums to a classic Corvette (“It’s cool to drive around in, but you know, it’s not like driving a new car.”); invoking the foundational optimization concept known as the backpack problem; and comparing the structural buildout to a layer cake.

“Hey Carol, do you mind pulling up the views of the sight lines, please?” he says at one point to Carol Finke, a former star tennis player at Northwestern who now serves as chief of staff for Ryan Sports Development, the five-year-old entity led by Ryan that is overseeing the project.

Finke cues up a nearby TV to an infographic favorably comparing the proximity of the fans at Ryan Field to that of the Intuit Dome, the arena of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers.

The new Ryan Field stands next door to the basketball arena and on the footprint of its eponymous, century-old predecessor. The successor stadium is significantly larger—by over a half-a-million square feet—than what existed before while accommodating only 35,000 fans, a 26% reduction from the old stadium and, by far, the smallest capacity in the Big Ten. Michigan Stadium, by comparison, can seat nearly three times that amount.

As Ryan ascends a flight of fresh concrete stairs onto the new stadium’s mezzanine concourse, he notes that the last of the chair-back seats (each 19 inches wide, with individual cupholder, and covered from above) had just been installed the day before. Two giant end-zone scoreboards are awash in neon as they undergo diagnostic testing. At this point, most of the remaining work involves installing the finishing touches to the many VIP lounges and private dining areas that would seem more conducive to Emirates Air first class passengers than Big Ten football fans. By Ryan’s telling, the stadium aspires to serve as both a Lotus Land for the luxury “fan experience,” and a font of egalitarianism: even the worst seat in the house is just 136 feet away from the field.

“My dad used to sit 182 feet from the field,” Ryan said, referring to his father’s premium perch in the prior venue.

Down to the Wires

The stadium’s structural reality, however, tells only a fraction of the story.

Over the last six years, the project has weathered the ebbs and flows in the local and international economies, a global pandemic, the ecological upheaval of college sports and the various vicissitudes of Northwestern football—a program whose fortunes have not always aligned neatly with the pace or purpose of a glorious new temple built to house it.

In this final stretch, Ryan said, one of the biggest practical challenges has been competing with data centers for skilled union electricians, about 200 of whom are working on the site today. In all, roughly 1,200 workers are still grinding away, some with power tools, others with 10-foot-long feather dusters, cleaning the rafters beneath the canopy.

Ryan said in order to secure the necessary late-stage labor, the project has had to pay its electricians 15% more and fly in about 60 from the east coast.

“If you’re on a flight from New York or Boston [to Chicago] on a Monday morning, you’ll wonder where all these people are working,” Ryan said. “They’re not going to LaSalle Street. They’re going to Ryan Field.”

On the other hand, the project managed to avoid one major source of inflationary pressure by securing all of its steel by 2023, before the Trump administration reimplemented and expanded tariffs on the product. If it were to go out to bid today, Ryan estimates this exact same construction would cost $1.3 billion—a 49% increase.

Pat Ryan Sr., the 89-year-old insurance titan worth $9.2 billion, according to Forbes, approached the school about helping to fund an entirely new stadium in 2020, and the university publicly announced the plan in September 2021. As part of the arrangement, the elder Ryan agreed to cover the lion’s share of the differences in building a new stadium, originally priced at $830 million, from the $300 million the university planned to spend on renovating the older one.

Initially, Pat Ryan Sr. made a $480 million contribution, the largest single gift in school history, to be split between the stadium and other projects. Ryan Jr. declined to specify the total stadium-related contribution, saying only that his family is paying for the “bulk” of the $575 million in costs not covered by the university.

Rather than just write a big check, the Ryan family wanted to also manage the project, which is being built as part of a joint venture between Turner Construction Company and Walsh Construction. Pat Ryan Jr., a technology entrepreneur with no background in architecture or construction, became the family’s point person.

The project launched amid the glory days of Pat Fitzgerald’s coaching tenure, with the Wildcats going 7-2 and finishing ranked No. 10 in the final AP poll of the COVID-shortened 2020 season.

Then, of course, things changed—rather dramatically.

Northwestern football descended into a scandal over an alleged runaway hazing culture and dozens of lawsuits ensued, leading the school to terminate Fitzgerald, who himself sued, later settling for tens of millions.

Following the coach’s firing in July 2023, more than 260 Northwestern faculty members signed a petition calling for the stadium plans to be halted until at least athletic department’s problems could be sorted out. Around then, Ryan told Sportico, the family went back to Northwestern’s leadership with an offer of an off-ramp.

As part of that proposal, which has not been previously reported, the Ryans agreed to cover half of the eight-figure expenditures that had been incurred to that point to walk away.

“We said, ‘If the board decides we don’t want to go forward because of whatever reason, we will split it with you,’” Ryan said. “‘We don’t want to do this because we were committed from before. We want to do it because you are committed going forward.’”

But the parties proceeded, and three years—and many settlements—later, Northwestern is on the verge of playing its games in the nicest sports venue in the greater Chicago area.

“It turns out, particularly on the board of trustees, that the idea of Northwestern as the only top-10 academic school in a power two conference and being in the Big Ten is really important,” Ryan said. “And so, the reason why my dad originally made that commitment is the one that led the board of trustees to recommit itself in the wake of the uncertainty that came out of the summer of 2023.”

Value Engineering

The stadium also serves as a counterpoint to the prediction made by sports economists and other observers that the advent of college athletes earning money would immediately redirect spending by schools and their benefactors away from pricey athletic infrastructure toward player compensation.

“This is a little bit like AI will get rid of radiologists,” Ryan said. “And it turns out they need more radiologists.”

He points to a number of major stadium renovation projects, either proposed or underway, in the post-NIL era, at places like Penn State, Rice, Kansas and Florida.

From a university or donor’s long-term perspective, Ryan argues, this is only so much value in raising money to subsidize athlete compensation. Infrastructure, by contrast, can generate revenue for decades. That distinction is central to how Ryan views the next phase of college sports—and he has plenty to say about it.

For one thing, Ryan believes the proposed proposed investment in the Big Ten by the University of California pension fund, which ultimately failed to materialize, would have primarily gone toward stadium improvements, and not player pay.

“What it would have done is given each of these schools a couple hundred million dollars to invest in things they need to drive their local revenue,” Ryan said. “You know, that’s a heck of a down payment on a big stadium project,” he said. “A school would have been profligate, would have been reckless, to spend that [on] revenue share.”

In an era of growing controversy over public stadium financing, Ryan Field also stands as an outlier—and perhaps, an awkward one. The Ryans, after all, own 22.5% of the Chicago Bears and a right to buy control of the team if the McCaskey family ever decides to sell. The Bears are pursuing a contentious move to Indiana, where state officials have offered over $1 billion in public support to build a new stadium in the northeast city of Hammond, just on the other side of the Illinois border.

When asked to juxtapose that financing plan to Northwestern’s, Ryan makes clear he doesn’t want to touch the subject with a 10-foot feather duster.

“I can’t talk about the Bears,” he said.

Although Ryan Sports Development won’t operate the new Ryan Field, Ryan and his family will continue to be deeply involved.

In May, ownership of the stadium was transferred to a for-profit wholly owned by the university called Ryan Field Foundation LLC. Ryan Jr. is a manager of the entity and chairman of the board while his brother Rob, the co-lead of Ryan Sports Foundation, also is a board member.

As for his newfound expertise in stadium development, Ryan Jr. said he has no concrete plans to take the show on the road beyond Evanston. But he seemed open to the idea that other Corvettes, backpack problems and layer cakes could figure into his future.

“It certainly feels like we’ve learned a lot, and whether that’s helpful to others by sharing what we’ve learned looking at ways that we might try to apply these learnings other places, I think is a question for after we get this thing off the ground successfully,” Ryan said. “I suppose if it’s successful, there’ll probably be some opportunities that would be worth exploring.”