Texas governor Greg Abbott held a call recently with college athletic directors across the state to discuss limiting stadium capacity to 50 percent this fall.
While Abbott said that limiting the number of people at games would be important, he also stressed that there is a lot more that operators will need to do to keep people safe.
“It includes more than just the seating strategy,” Abbott told the Austin American-Statesman. “It includes the way people will go about the process of entering stadiums. They’ll include things such as avoiding large gathering areas within stadiums and certain other strategies.”
Texas athletic officials are already modeling how seating will be managed at the 100,000-seat Royal-Memorial Stadium this fall. According to the Statesman, UT sold more than 62,000 season tickets for the 2019 season
UT external operations director Drew Martin says that stadium capacity would need to be somewhere around 30 to 35 percent capacity to ensure a 6-foot spacing. The Longhorns are also looking at one-way aisles, line queues outside the restrooms and other virus mitigation measures.
“All of these athletic directors, they are charged with the duty of coming up with the best strategy for their particular stadium and presenting it to the doctors to serve on my team to make sure that the game plan, if you would, will satisfy the standards that the doctors believe is a safe way to approach these gatherings,” Abbott said.
