Photo courtesy Chip Kelly
Drexel Football Team to receive new stadium, training facility
Not to be outdone by Temple University’s recent decision to build a new $100 million football stadium, Drexel has decided to come up with one of their own. The new Panini-Brandywiener Dragon Stadium will be the new centerpiece of campus life according to DrexelNOW, the propaganda arm of Drexel University.
“For too long our football team has operated without proper facilities for either play or training. With this new stadium, we will finally have the world-class football team this school deserves,” athletics director Aaric Wilmur noted.
The Panini-Brandywiener Dragon Stadium will be local to campus, occupying a lot which will span from 34th to 37th streets. The neighborhood will be completely levelled for the new stadium. To accommodate stadium crowds and provide students a convenient area for tailgating, the area between 32rd and 34th street will become surface parking.
There will be seating for 35,001 people. To facilitate stadium crowds, reversible lanes will be installed on Spring Garden Street and Lancaster Avenue, and the route 11 trolley will be suspended on game day to allow more cars into the site.
The stadium is to be multi-use, and can be adopted for soccer, football, baseball and of course our flagship sport, squash. A retractable roof will be provided so games may happen in all weather conditions. Funding – to the tune of $100,000,001, is to be provided via ground-lease deals accompanying the Schuylkill Meters development.
Drexel President Frizzle Fries has said of the new stadium, “Yeah, fuck you Temple! Our stadium seats THIRTY FIVE THOUSAND… AND ONE! AND COSTS ONE HUNDRED MILLION… AND ONE DOLLARS! WE’RE BETTER THAN YOU! YEAH! FUCK IT! YEAH! IN YOUR FACE!”
Students are excited for the stadium. “I think a football stadium is exactly what Drexel needs,” freshman Jack Johnson noted. “Homecoming is such a bore without a football team to cheer for and generally go out of our minds about. Plus, without tailgating culture, we lag far behind other universities of our size in drunken hi-jinks and DUI convictions.”
Some students, though, are more skeptical. “A football stadium is the last thing that Drexel needs,” sophomore Peter Dingles explained. “What we really need is a stadium for a sport that respects Drexel’s heritage as a pioneering engineering school – we should level both Powelton Village and Mantua to build a world-class F1 racing circuit.”
Local residents are up in arms about the idea. The Powelton Village Civic Association released a press statement which said merely, “Are you fucking crazy?” and the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia simply threw a flaming bag of poop through President Fries’ office window. Many Drexel professors own homes in the path of the proposed stadium.
“They’ve threatened us, man!” one professor said, who asked us to refer to him only as Dr. R. Z.
“They said they’d either take our homes, or take our tenure! This is extortion, man! It’s a conspiracy!” he said, waving his fist.
The administration has refused to comment, though the little known Office for Fucking Over Faculty (OFOF), an offshoot from the well-known Office for Fucking Over Students (see our feature in the April 2015 issue), issued a statement claiming Dr. R. Z. was not only clinically insane but also had a forged diploma, and that his tenure was to be revoked regardless, along with half a dozen other professors he was friends with.