Re: Ford Field Rink Installation
A couple of comments here. As you indicated at the beginning, next weekend will tell the story.
For starters, a reasonably and quality response. Worth continuing in conversation.
My objections to this being held at Ford Field have nothing to do with it being in Detroit. While I don't have Detroit on my list of places that I want to visit sometime (as opposed to DC, Denver, St Louis, Boston and Tampa) I think you're right, Detroit is a natural and historic fit as a location for the event. If this were being held at Joe Louis, I don't think anybody would be complaining about the site. In fact, I'm surprised that it's taken so long (20 years) to be back in Detroit.
I was not attempting to portray a prejudice against the city; rather, I was illustrating the logical pressure in favor of holding the sport's signature event in one of its flagship cities. 20 years between Frozen Fours in Michigan, when they being awarded to worthy but less significant venues like St. Louis, D.C. and Columbus is too long, and I think the powers-that-be understood this. Rather, the issue is the lack of a quality venue in Detroit.
I disagree that nobody would have an issue with the Joe as a venue. It may not have caused the noise now heard about Ford Field, but Joe is one of the worst conceivable places for a Frozen Four. It has 20,000 seats, a nice sheet of ice, and the requisite number of locker rooms; in all other respects it is wholly inadequate to host the sport's flagship event. It looks terrible, it is in a back-corner location of Detroit near nothing, the concourses are dreadful, and it is not even beloved by the tradition-bleeding fans who populate it game after game. It would be a much-loathed disaster, the worst venue for a Frozen Four since Cincinnati. Nobody in their right mind would host it there.
The Palace is a newer, nicer arena, but again unworkable--it's not in town near things to do. It would be kind of like hosting a Frozen Four in Chicago, but with the arena actually located in Joliet near nothing, managed by a company with no interest in hockey that rarely even has ice on the floor.
Ford Field is actually by far the nicest and most event-friendly indoor venue in the Detroit area. I believe they looked to Ford Field not because they were looking for a stunt, but because the CCHA had been mostly ignored in Frozen Four locations over the past two decades and a never-before-tried arrangement at Ford Field was the only tenable option.
At football/baseball stadiums, you generally have a shallower angle to the seats than at a basketball/hockey arena. This matters, especially since there is also typically a dropoff of some number of feel from the lowest level of seating to the surface the game is being played on. In football and baseball, this isn't an issue because the actual area that the game is played on is inset from the edge somewhat, with spare players, etc filling up the in-between area. So having a shallow angle that's raised somewhat allows fans to look over the team on the sidelines and still see the actual playing field.
This is often inaccurate, at least in regards to football stadia. Baseball stadiums do have shallow angles, but most football stadium angles are quite steep, and some (irrelevantly, in the SEC) are downright frightening. A number of college hockey venues, such as Mariucci and Yost, have steep seating angles themselves. However, modern NHL arenas are built with very shallow lower bowl angles--I remember visiting a friend 25 rows up center ice in Buffalo, and being disappointed that you could not see any ice over the glass--very low. The X is the same way. This is a reaction to the necessity of putting luxury boxes and a balcony over the seats without making them too high.
Ford Field does not have a tremendous angle of seating, but it is steeper than lower bowls of modern NHL arenas, and its seat construction has the advantage of not having luxury boxes to deal with in the seating deck structure.
A properly set up hockey/basketball facility, on the other hand, has a steeper angle, but the seats get very close the to the edge of the playing surface, and the bottom row of seats is generally effectively at the same level as the playing surface.
In order to set up a hockey rink in a football stadium, there is forced dead space in between the spectators and the structure of the rink itself, this leads to the reviews that I've seen for every stadium hockey game that I've seen in that the view of the game ranged from mediocre to horrible.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you are describing the typical outdoor game setup with the rink in the middle of the field, wide tracts of space separating the boards from the stands. They originally planned to do Ford Field the same way (which I objected to) but saw reason and rotated the ice to sit at a 90 degree angle across the field in one endzone. This puts one side of the ice and both goals very close to the seats, and while there is a little bit of space, it is partially filled in with shallow angle seats and partially mitigated by the elevation of those rows. The resulting actual viewing distance and angle, from pictures of the setup, appears to be <b>at worst</b> slightly less optimal than at a standard arena; at best, in the upper decks, at least as good. I suspect people will very pleasantly surprised with their views from the upper deck. This is part of what makes Ford Field so uniquely well suited for this.
The reviews from other football field games involve a seating situation that does not exist here, and thus have little application. For what it's worth, I sat in the upper deck of Spartan Stadium at the Cold War, and my view was great.
Again, I have no objection at all to getting thirty-plus thousand people into the Frozen Four, but I want those newcomers to the college game that I love so much to have the same kind of experience I have watching hockey games at the Xcel/Pepsi/Verizon Center, Mariucci/Ralph Englestad Arenas, etc. These are all very well designed to be able to watch hockey in.
And no, I don't want college hockey to fail, I want this experiment to not be duplicated for the championships again. Figure out a way to get 30K people in to see the game at an actual hockey arena and I'd be all for it. I think that would be great to get that many new people hooked on this.
Fair enough. The only other place where this would be remotely feasible is the HHH, but we already know that the NCAA is perfectly happy using the fabulous hockey arena in the Cities for this event, so I don't see that happening. I want people to get the feel of great locations like that, too--unfortunately, those types of arenas do not exist in Detroit, at least not yet. Momentum appears to be building for a new downtown arena, and if one is built I have no doubt that the FF will be back in town and in the new arena.
My major point is that while I personally like the idea of expanding the event a bit and gaining wider attention (and If GravaLeast hadn't jumped on that whistle, Michigan would be there and it would be unreal), that is not the only reason Ford Field happened. It happened to include one of the three flagship states of college hockey in an event that had been gone in 20 years, and did so in the way that was least unattractive.
Hopefully, they've figured out some way to set things up to address the concerns I have, but somehow I rather doubt it, and I'll be finding out first hand next weekend.
Keep an open mind, and enjoy what you do get--a nice weekend in the nice area of Detroit on a dynamite weekend in a facility that, while ill-suited for hockey, is a great place to be. If you want to see what you could have gotten, make the trip to the JLA. Lament missing its sightlines, be thankful you don't have to use its restrooms.
