As many as two tight ends will be on the field today at Ohio Stadium, but more than 96,000 will be in the stands.
The ongoing $187 million stadium renovation addresses many aspects of fan comfort, but one clearly has been ignored: seat size.
Each spectator still is allocated a meager 18 inches on the bench seats. And if even one or two fannies in the row are queen-size, sitting down after a standing cheer turns into a race for space.
"I try to avoid standing up, and if I do, I make sure I sit down first,'' said Bill Patterson, an Upper Arlington businessman who has attended Buckeye football games for nearly 40 years.
"If you end up in a section where there's a 300-pound person, you're in deep doo-doo.''
And as the season wears on, and more clothes get piled on, the seat squeeze gets worse, he pointed out.
But is butt space in the 'Shoe unusually spare?
Armed with a measuring tape, The Dispatch set out to determine the bottom line.
Visits were made to nine venues in Columbus, and several seats in each were measured at their widest points.
Legroom -- another complaint for many spectators -- was measured from the front of the higher seat to the back of the lower seat.
In facilities where most seats are benches, such as the Ohio and Columbus Crew stadiums, the length of a few benches was measured and divided by the number of rear ends allocated for that bench.
The 18 inches of rear-end space in the Ohio and Crew stadiums turned out to be the most available, equaling a few 18-inch seats in the Southern Theatre.
So why do so many patrons feel like sardines while rooting for the Buckeyes?
The measurements are deceiving, explained Kathleen Robinette, senior research anthropologist at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton.
Shoulders -- not hips -- usually are the widest point of the body, she said.
"If your butt is taking up 18 inches, your arms and shoulders are probably taking up 24 inches.''
A chair takes shoulder width into account. Chair arms add about 3 inches of width to the entire seat, said Edwin Yates, marketing manager for seat manufacturer American Seating in Grand Rapids, Mich.
So while seat bottoms in Cooper Stadium's chairs average about 17 inches, spectators actually have about 20 inches in which to park their bodies.
To illustrate her point, Robinette -- an expert in the science of anthropometry, the study of measuring human beings -- dug up a 1989 body- measurement study of men and women in the military. She quickly pointed out that measurements among civilians would be "only worse than this'' -- meaning bigger.
In the study, men in the 99th percentile had a seated hip measurement of 16.7 inches. In other words, one out of 100 military men had hips larger than that when they sat down. For women, the measurement was slightly larger -- 18.2 inches.
Men's shoulders in the study were 21.5 inches; women's, 19.2 inches, Robinette said.
Neither would fit comfortably in 18 inches of butt space, she said.
"Everyone's arms will be in the seat next to them.''
Mike Dolan, assistant director of athletic facilities at Ohio State, said that although seat size at Ohio Stadium has been a sore point for years, he isn't aware that there were any discussions about widening the seats when the stadium renovation was planned.
Stadium fans shouldn't feel that they have been singled out for butt compression, however. Other stadiums offer equally scanty seat space after renovations.
When the Buffalo Bills football team renovated its Ralph Wilson Stadium last year and installed 23,124 new seats, fans found their knees digging into the seats in front of them. So many complained that stadium engineers installed spacers to realign each seat, adding about 3 inches to the legroom and stretching it to nearly 11 inches.
At the new National Car Rental Center in Sunrise, Fla., legroom for hockey fans was so minimal that 8,000 cup holders were removed from the backs of seats.
In Columbus, legroom ranges from about 8 inches at Value City Arena and Southern Theatre to 23 inches in some areas of Ohio Stadium.
Some facilities have bowed to the growing bulkiness of Americans.
When the Ohio Theatre was renovated in 1994, three-fourths inch was added to the width of each plush, red seat in the mid and upper balconies, plus an additional inch of legroom. The comfort adjustment cost the theatre 118 seats, lowering capacity to 27,079.
More than 10 years earlier, seats on the floor and in the loge were replaced with wider seats with more legroom, said Jay Panzer, director of facility development for the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts, which operates the Ohio, the Southern and the Palace theaters. Similar changes were made at the Palace in the 1980s, he said.
"There's no question that the average American has increased significantly in size,'' Panzer said. "People are better fed, they don't expend as much energy, and they take in more. In the seating industry, it's accepted that people have gotten bigger, and we try to accommodate this.''
At the Southern, which was extensively renovated in 1998, even more thought was given to comfort. Chairs were stretched from 22 to 23 inches, including arms, from 18 to 19 inches. That, and some other changes such as lighting, sliced the theater's capacity in half, to 933 seats, Panzer said.
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