Why the football stadium in Glendale, Arizona was called the University of Phoenix Stadium


If you've ever been to Glendale, Arizona, I'm sure that you've seen the football stadium where the Arizona Cardinals play. It's big, and you can see it from the freeway. I live in Glendale, and most locals just call it the Cardinals Stadium. As of this writing, January 2021, it's the State Farm Stadium, and when it was built it was called, believe it or not, the University of Phoenix Stadium. I'll see if I can explain.

I'm no expert on football, but I'm an old marketing guy, and I know the importance of getting a company name out there, like on a stadium that millions of people see. It's worth a LOT of money, and companies are willing to pay the big bucks to get their name on a stadium. So when the football stadium here in Glendale was being built, many companies offered bids to get their name on it.

The winning bid was from an online college called the University of Phoenix. This caused some confusion, and a few smiles from people like me, as the stadium was for professional football, and had no connection whatsoever to a University. And besides, the University of Phoenix didn't have a football team - they didn't even have a campus, they were online only. And it gets sillier!

The University of Phoenix Stadium wasn't even in Phoenix, it was in Glendale. OK, to be fair it's all the greater Phoenix metro area, but here in Glendale we have our own mayor, police force, etc., which means that we're our own city. A small detail to people from out of town, but important to us Glendale civic pride folks!

In 2017, the name was changed to State Farm Stadium, which is a little bit better. It didn't cause us locals to start calling it that, we still call it the Cardinals stadium. State Farm, by the way, is an insurance company, and really has nothing to with "states" or "farms".

It is a beautiful building, and I toured it after it was built, but I really have no interest in football, so I've never gone to a game. It's just east of the 101, and I've always love seeing it when I come home from visiting friends in Los Angeles. If you've never seen it IRL (In Real Life) it's worth a look. If there's a game playing, or an event, there's plenty of parking, but it's quite a hike to the stadium. Wear comfortable shoes, and of course a jersey with the name of your favorite player on it.

Thank you for visiting the Cardinals Stadium with me!

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more