Today's Tidbit... The 1920s Stadium Boom and Those Never Built

The 1920s saw a major stadium building boom on campuses across the country, including twenty-eight stadiums currently in use among Power Five teams. Besides the stadiums built that decade, others were proposed or announced but never materialized.

An example of the latter came at Washington University in St. Louis. WashU’s home field, Francis Field, hosted the 1904 Olympics and the stadium remains in use today. But in the 1920s, WashU played in the Missouri Valley Conference, which was in the process of losing Oklahoma, Missouri, and Nebraska, so perhaps the Bears thought they needed to step it up.

So, WashU announced plans for a 50,000 on-campus stadium along with plans to raise the money for the stadium in November 1928. Of course, the stadium was never built, WashU eventually dropped out of the Missouri Valley and plays DIII football today.

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