Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

The University of Houston tore down its own history to build on the exact same spot. TDECU Stadium at 3874 Holman Street opened on August 29, 2014, with a win over UTSA, rising from the footprint of Robertson Stadium, which was demolished in December 2012 after the athletics department concluded renovation could not deliver what football in the Big 12 era demands. The $128 million build - part state bonds, part student-approved fees, part private money - was fast: groundbreaking on February 8, 2013, and kickoff eighteen months later, with Manhattan Construction working from designs by DLR Group and Page that reoriented the stadium east-to-west to align with the campus grid and open sightlines to the downtown skyline. Capacity is 40,000 with foundations already poured for expansion to 60,000 - roughly 10,000 more seats possible on the north sideline upper grandstand and another 10,000 in upper end zones - while the premium inventory runs 26 suites, 42 loge boxes, 766 club seats and four open-air party decks. The Texas Dow Employees Credit Union bought naming rights in July 2014, weeks before the first game, and the building's visual signature became the "Cougar Cage," a permeable patterned-metal wrap that encloses the bowl and glows at night. The record crowd of 42,822 watched the 2016 Louisville game during the Cougars' peak under Tom Herman, and the stadium has moonlighted as the home of the UFL's Houston Roughnecks across several spring seasons. The east end houses the Bert F. Winston Band and Performance Center with recital halls and classrooms, making the stadium a genuine campus building, and the upgrades keep coming - a 7,200-square-foot video board and the adjacent Memorial Hermann Football Operations Center arrived in August 2025 as Houston settled into Big 12 membership.