Rice Stadium

Rice Stadium is the home of the Rice Owls football team in Houston, Texas. The bowl-shaped, concrete stadium seats around 47,000 today, down from its original 70,000-seat capacity, and is one of the older on-campus stadiums in major college football. Its classic horseshoe design and open end zones give it a vintage college-football look rare in modern FBS venues. On fall Saturdays it's a quieter, historic setting for Owls football in the American Athletic Conference.

Opened in 1950 with a capacity near 70,000, Rice Stadium hosted Super Bowl VIII in January 1974, when the Miami Dolphins beat the Minnesota Vikings 24-7. It was also the site of President John F. Kennedy's famous 1962 "We choose to go to the Moon" speech, delivered to a packed stadium crowd during the height of the Space Race. Those two moments give the stadium a cultural weight well beyond Rice's own football history. Downsized over the decades to its current capacity, it remains a notable landmark in Houston sports and American history.