In January 1924, the University of Colorado construction crew began laying the foundation for a new stadium.
Using a steam shovel to move dirt in a ravine on the northeast side of campus, CU embarked on a project that would eventually cost the university $65,000 all told — or just $2.60 per seat.
A century later, the Buffs began a frenzied 2023 season in Boulder marked by the arrival of coach Deion Sanders and an entire slate of sellouts. The home opener against Nebraska brought Big Noon Kickoff and a slew of celebrities. The next week against CSU saw both of college football’s major pregame shows come to town while a rapping Lil Wayne led the Buffs onto the field.
With those humble roots and a team that’s had to fight for national relevance at every turn, Folsom Field’s emerged as an iconic venue on the college football landscape, possessing a unique combination of striking scenery, a live mascot and an electricity that’s re-emerged this fall amid the cultural phenomenon that is Coach Prime.
“Even though it’s not as large as (Michigan’s) The Big House or (Ohio State’s) The Shoe, and it doesn’t have the history or seats like the Rose Bowl, it’s still a place that’s feared by opponents,” former CU quarterback Darian Hagan said. “It’s a place that gets loud when the fans are behind you, and this year, with the fans behind the team, it’s been rockin‘.
“… I’d say it’s the No. 1 college stadium in the country — the atmosphere, the scenery, the mascot and now Coach Prime. It’s a quadruple effect.”
Folsom Field was constructed as a replacement for CU football’s original home, Gamble Field, which could no longer meet the university’s rising interest in intercollegiate athletics with its temporary bleachers. CU chose Folsom Field’s site because it required limited excavation. And with the help of a majority of the school’s football players, who helped build the stadium, it opened Oct. 11, 1924, as the state’s largest stadium at the time.
Constructed in a single-deck horseshoe design, it was originally called Colorado Stadium, and sometimes referred to as Norlin Stadium. It took its modern namesake in 1944 as an homage to the late coach Fred Folsom. The original capacity was 26,000, but it has been renovated/altered 11 times over the last century to its current capacity of 50,183.
The stadium’s sandstone exterior and red-clay tile roofs match the Tuscan architectural style shared by the rest of CU’s campus, and the university name etched into the asphalt beyond the south end zone serves as a reminder of where you are.
So, too, do the views from the east side of the stadium, where from high up fans have a clear view of the Flatirons and, beyond that, the Rocky Mountains. That vista once made its way into pop culture as part of the closing credits for the late 1970s sitcom “Mork and Mindy,” starring Robin Williams, who also stood on the Folsom Field goalposts in a shot for the show’s opening credits that brought national attention to the stadium.
Add in the tradition of running Ralphie — the school’s bison mascot began leading the team onto the field in 1967 — and Larry Zimmer argues the stadium has “a unique magic.”
“When I first got to Folsom in 1971, at that point, it really didn’t measure up to the other best college stadiums in the country,” said Zimmer, the longtime radio voice of the Buffs who retired in 2015. “But over the years they’ve really improved it a lot, and it’s got an amazing feeling right now. I don’t think anyone can argue that.”
To Zimmer’s point, Folsom Field wasn’t always dripping in mystique.
John Meadows, a member of CU’s first Big Eight championship team in 1961 and the university’s associate athletic director from 1999 to 2005, recalls when the Buffs’ locker room was a beige shed with a dirt floor on the back side of Balch Fieldhouse, which was built in 1936 and still serves as the west side of the stadium. When the shed wasn’t being used as a locker room, it doubled as storage for field equipment.
“I can remember sitting in there eating oranges in the first game of the ’61 season, then Monday in practice, we got pummeled by the first-teamers, who just beat us up because we stole all their oranges,” Meadows recalled. “Halftime oranges, a little water and soda-pop. Like the halftimes, the facility itself then wasn’t anything fancy. Recruits today wouldn’t think much of it.”
But over the decades, as the university amended and expanded the stadium, its legacy grew.
CU added a second deck in 1956, bumping up the capacity to 45,000. In 1967, the original track was removed and more seats were added. In ’68, the Flatirons Club on the west side was built. In ’91, CU added the Dal Ward Athletic Center on the north side, and by 2003 the stadium was at a 53,750 capacity. The Champions Center was added to the northeast side in 2015, as well as new club seating areas, bringing the capacity back down to its current number.
The sandstone remained a constant through it all, while the additions and CU’s notoriously tight sidelines give the stadium an intimate feel that also amplifies the volume of the crowd. According to CU athletics historian David Plati, the Buffs have the third-tightest sidelines in college football, with the stands roughly a dozen feet from the action.
“You get reverberation off those skyboxes on the east side, and it makes the stadium like a canyon in conjunction with the press boxes pushed up close on the west side,” explained Jon Burianek, Folsom Field’s associate director from 1968-2006. “And you’ve
got a big stone building at the north end (with the Dal Ward building), so it traps all the sound in the stadium.”
Plati said the crowd reached about 120 decibels during the Buffs’ comeback win over Oklahoma in 2007. The unofficial college football noise record is 133.6 decibels, set at Husky Stadium during a Washington-Nebraska game in 1992, but the energy around Coach Prime’s squad has Folsom Field testing its boundaries once again.
Russell Allen, the technical director for CU athletics for a quarter century, says he’s had to push the sound system to its limit trying to keep up with the crowd this year. CU got a new JBL sound system in 2022 which maxes out at 105 decibels, so Allen estimates “the crowd can get to 110, 115 pretty easily at times.”
“I was around when we were national champions and during coach (Bill) McCartney’s run,” Allen said. “That was a pretty special time, and it was always special when Oklahoma and Nebraska came to town. But this year blows that away, absolutely, in terms of a sheer crowd and energy standpoint.”
This year, the Buffs started fast at 3-0, including emotional wins over rivals Nebraska and CSU at home. But while the stretch of the season is revealing the growing pains CU must go through amid Sanders’ extensive roster rebuild, diehards believe it’s only a matter of time before more you-had-to-be-there games unfold in Boulder. That belief remains firm even as the Buffs prepare for their leap from the dying Pac-12 to the challenge of the expanded Big 12 next year.
When that does happen, those future moments will be added to a long list of momentous points in the stadium’s history.
There was Byron “Whizzer” White’s coming-out party on Nov. 7, 1936, when the future NFL star and Supreme Court justice first entered the national consciousness by scoring all 31 of CU’s points in a win over Utah on a snowy Saturday.
There was CU’s triumph over Nebraska on Oct. 25, 1986, when the Buffs upset the third-ranked Huskers 20-10 for their first win over their rival since 1967 in what is widely considered the turning point in McCartney’s tenure. That day also produced one of the first field-stormings in the stadium’s history.
There was CU’s 41-20 win over Iowa State on Nov. 19, 1994, when soon-to-be Heisman Trophy winner Rashaan Salaam hit the 2,000-yard rushing mark in the fourth quarter. Quarterback Kordell Stewart became the Big Eight’s all-time total offense leader and McCartney announced his retirement on the same day.
And, of course, there’s 62-36. For many CU fans, that demolition of then-No. 2 Nebraska on Nov. 23, 2021, stands as the most iconic moment in Folsom Field history.
“The crowd, the vibe, everything about that day was (immaculate),” recalled then-Buffs quarterback Bobby Pesavento. “Folsom was absolutely on fire.
“As the crowd was storming the field, I still had my helmet on and I was doing everything I could to protect that ball and make sure I got it back inside. Everybody was trying to get their hands on it. … I had the ball in one arm, my other arm wrapped around (my mom who came down) and I dragged her back inside Dal Ward through the mayhem.”
But the emotions of Folsom Field haven’t always revolved around wins and losses. The stadium’s hosted 56 different musical acts, including being a consistent venue for The Grateful Dead dating back to the band’s first performance there in 1972. It’s also the annual site of CU graduation and serves as the finish line for the Bolder Boulder, a renowned 10K road race held each Memorial Day weekend.
Perhaps the saddest moment in the stadium’s history was when quarterback and program icon Sal Aunese was succumbing to stomach cancer in 1989.
“The spring game in ’89, when the team picked Sal Anuse up on their shoulders, that was tough for everyone in the stadium that day,” Plati said. “He was a month into having stomach cancer, and everyone pretty much knew it was incurable. We didn’t know how much time he had left, and by the end of September he died. That was our largest spring crowd at the time. To see the team rally around Sal at halftime, and pick him up — it was pretty heartbreaking.”
The future of the stadium amid the beginning of the Coach Prime Era, no matter whom you ask on campus, is bright. With this year’s six home sellouts, CU athletic director Rick George believes “this is just the start of a string of sellouts that will last for quite some time.” The previous record was four in 1993.
“As we continue to get better, it’s going to harder and harder to get a ticket,” George predicted.
Folsom Field could soon be coming into the modern stadium age. This week, the university took a step in that direction with the announcement of a new video board on the south end, which at 136-feet wide by 36-feet high will be more than five times the surface area of the old board. It will be ready by the 2024 season opener. The ribbon board below the new video board will also be expanded.
“That’s going to enhance the experience significantly,” George said. “In addition to repays, we’ll have the ability to do a lot of different, fun things on that board to engage the fans.”
There’s long been discussions on what to do with the west side of the stadium, most notably rebuilding Balch Fieldhouse. George said that’s “the next big thing” on the university’s agenda for the stadium.
That west-side renovation would keep the stadium’s capacity roughly the same while morphing the fieldhouse into a multi-use area with quick-service restaurants and improved concessions. Updating the restrooms is also on the list, as the troughs in the men’s rooms around the stadium date back to its inception.
“There hasn’t been much done to (the west side) in the last 70 years, and we need to make the fieldhouse a facility that’s going to embrace our students more,” George said. “We’d like to make it a walk-through destination for our students during the course of the week, and then also create more premium seating areas and club areas for our patrons.
“We wouldn’t want to change the look of the stadium. But we need to fix the west side of Folsom and make it a place that generates revenue, and generates some premium opportunities for our fans, alumni and businesses in the community. I can’t put a date on the timing, but it’s something we want to do in the next few years.”
Of course, keeping Folsom Field as electric as it’s been in 2023 circles back to Coach Prime, and the university’s ability to keep him on campus. Sanders is in the first season of a five-year, $29.5 million contract, but it isn’t hard to imagine better-resourced programs attempting to lure him away with a more lucrative deal — not unlike Mel Tucker in 2020.
“We’re one more transfer-portal class away from being really damn good,” Pesavento said. “It starts there, but there has to be consistency throughout the staff. I would love to see Prime never go anywhere.”
No matter what happens, George emphasized, Folsom Field is built to endure, and transcend, any coach or player.
“Us making modifications to it like we’re talking about, and with the scoreboard being the start of that, it’s going to be a difference-maker,” George said. “We just have to be creative on what’s next and how we can continue to enhance this great, iconic stadium to make it ready for showcasing CU football for the next 100 years.”
Folsom Field At-A-Glance
Initial Cost: $65,000
Initial Capacity: 26,000-30,000
First Game: Oct. 11, 1924 (CU 39, Regis 0)
Previously Known As: Colorado Stadium, Norlin Stadium
CU’s Overall Folsom Record: 327-189-10
CU’s Conference Record: 204-133-9
CU’s Record vs Ranked Teams: 36-71-2
CU’s Record vs Nebraska: 11-21-2
CU’s Record vs Colorado State: 24-7
College Football Hall of Famers: 9 CU players, one coach (Bill McCartney)
Heisman Trophy Winners: 1 (Rashaan Salaam)
Current Capacity: 50,183
