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1930 – present
The line: 54,000 seats at the 1930 opening, a figure that held to 1965; with temporary bleachers the ground could hold about 61,000, and the largest crowd of the pre-expansion era was 61,296, for Purdue on October 6, 1962. Then 59,075, from 1966 to 1996 — a larger number inside the same walls, reached mainly by narrowing the average seat width from 18 inches to 17; one university history phrases the 59,075 as the stadium's long-standing capacity "in its original composition," listed from 1965, and that one-year difference in dating stands as the sources give it. Then 80,225 in 1997, from the expansion begun in 1994 at a cost of 53 million dollars, which added 21,150 seats and an upper bowl; the figure was adjusted in print to 80,102 for 1998–99, 80,232 for 2000 and 80,795 for 2001–2016. Then 77,622 from 2017 — the Campus Crossroads figure, a 400-million-dollar project announced on January 29, 2014, which wrapped the stadium in the Duncan Student Center, O'Neill Hall and Corbett Family Hall, and took seats out partly by giving each bleacher seat two inches of width back.
The ground and the streak: FieldTurf replaced natural grass in 2014, after 84 seasons on grass. Home games have sold out regularly since 1964. The stadium's 500th game was played on November 18, 2023, against Wake Forest; cumulative attendance entering it stood at 30,259,839.
Sources:
- Notre Dame Stadium history — the capacity line and its adjustments; the 1962 Purdue crowd; the 1994–97 expansion and its cost; the Crossroads project and its components; the 2014 FieldTurf installation; the 500th game and the cumulative attendance.