TIAA Bank Field was a state-of-the-art football complex when it opened in 1995, and though it’s pushing 30 years old, it underwent two major renovations in the last seven years.
Jacksonville has a reputation around the league for not being able to consistently fill its stadium, but it’s hard to argue the quality of the stadium is a reason for that. TIAA Bank Field was a state-of-the-art football complex when it opened in 1995, and though it’s pushing 30 years old, it underwent two major renovations in the last seven years.
But in 2021, only six NFL stadiums are older than the one the city of Jacksonville built for its expansion team, and two of them (Chicago’s Soldier Field and Green Bay’s Lambeau Field) are historic venues that have undergone significant renovation.
In his ranking of the stadiums around the league, Touchdown Wire’s Mark Lane places TIAA Bank at just 26th in the league, three spots above Nissan Stadium, the home of the division rival Tennessee Titans.
The home of the Jaguars is a little more cramped, which was still a design of the stadiums from the 1990s. Jacksonville fans do have a swimming pool and the weather in December and January isn’t wretched like it is up north. Florida man can enjoy a late-season NFL game.
The swimming pools were added as part of the 2014 renovation, alongside massive, record-setting video scoreboards. Still, it’s hard for the Jags’ aging venue to compete with some of the palaces being built today.
TIAA Bank Field cost $211 million to build, adjusting for inflation, while Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, New York’s MetLife Stadium, Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium, and Minnesota’s US Bank Stadium, all of which have opened since 2010, had price tags north of $1 billion. SoFi Stadium, which opened in Los Angeles in 2020, cost a whopping $5.5 billion to build.
The team has hinted that another major renovation could be in the works in the not-so-distant future, with it being rumored that the team is looking to the renovations Miami did to Hard Rock Stadium as a blueprint, such as adding the open-air canopy to provide all seats with shade.
If these changes come to fruition, Jacksonville’s spot on these rankings will almost certainly rise. But for now, all the work that has been put into the stadium still just isn’t quite enough to compare with the newer, elite venues in the league.
