photo by: Nick Krug

An aerial shot from the east of David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium in 2017.

A University of Kansas-hired consultant may be recommending that the university’s football stadium shrink to a capacity of less than 40,000 people as part of a major campus gateway project, but KU’s athletic director is pushing back on the idea.

A day after the Journal-World reported on a consultant’s report that recommended KU shrink the size of David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium to 39,839 seats — making it the smallest in the Big 12 — athletic director Travis Goff took to Twitter to predict that won’t be what ultimately happens.

“Love our consultants but capacity will be over 40K,” Goff said via Twitter early on Friday morning. “This project will have something for everyone — affordable tickets, the best premium seating, real home field advantage. Oh yeah, and parking & tailgating are key priorities. We’re all over it Hawks — remember, I’m one of you.”

The University of Kansas on Thursday began seeking proposal from developers who want to work with the university on a gateway project to renovate the football stadium and add a conference center, hotel, concert venue, student housing and restaurants and retail to the university property surrounding the stadium at 11th and Mississippi streets.

Consultants with Hunden Strategic Partners recommended the smaller stadium for a variety of reasons, including the space constraints KU faces in fitting the desired conference center, hotel and other amenities on the relatively small site at the northern edge of the KU campus.

But the consultants also said KU would still be well served by the smaller-capacity stadium. The consultants noted that KU football averaged 26,610 fans during the 2015-2019 seasons, which was a period of few victories for the team. In 2022, when the football program became nationally ranked and bowl bound again, the team averaged fewer than 35,000 fans per game.

However, the consultant’s report didn’t spend any time talking about attendance totals during KU’s previous heyday during the Mark Mangino era when KU had strong fan interest as a nationally ranked program and an Orange Bowl-winning team.

In 2006, KU officials announced the season average was just over 44,000 per game.

The idea of KU dropping below 40,000 seats in its stadium seemed to catch many fans off guard, as several social media posts said such a reduction of more than 7,000 seats from KU’s current total sent a poor message about what KU thought of its prospects in the football world.

Consultants and KU officials, however, have noted that a recent trend in stadium design has been for seating capacities to become smaller. Goff’s tweet didn’t rule out the possibility that KU will reduce its capacity, instead only predicting the total would be above 40,000 seats.

In a brief interview with the Journal-World on Friday, KU Chancellor Douglas Girod did not offer a specific seating capacity that he thinks the stadium ultimately will be. Instead, he said KU really is focusing on finding the right partner to help it develop the Campus Gateway project.

“What we are looking for right now is a developer who can help us think about all the possibilities from all the feedback we are getting and how do we put all of those pieces and blocks together in one cohesive project,” Girod said.