It's my understanding that about 90% of the stadium are season ticket holders. Since it holds 70,000 and change, by my estimation, about 63,000-65,000 are season ticket holders. Don't know how they'll handle that.

I agree on the open roof. I thought it was silly we had a roof in the first place. However, after the Pitt game when all of the fans complained so much, I guess McNair guessed right in having a roof. I hate to say it but we're probably not the most diehard fanbase in the world.

They can expand capacity to 70K if needed.

I hope that's what they do, but the stadium doesn't have the drainage of an open air stadium. A decent rain could turn the field into a lake.

this still baffels me. i know a lot of people in houston are wimps with regard to sports (see the steelers game a couple of years ago) but how do you build a football stadium that can't handle rain?

Jut repeating what I heard. I don't even know if that's true. It was designed to have a roof, but if you think about how our field works it makes sense. The field is basically just a bunch of "trays" with grass and dirt in them that are moved into and out of the stadium as needed. They sit on a concrete floor in the stadium or in the parking lot outside. Most outdoors stadiums have several layers of gravel/sand with drainage pipes to let the water out. There's no need (or room) for that with this set up as long as the roof is working. I think it is only a problem in the case of pretty heavy rains in a short amount of time.

Isn't the roof of Reliant some 260ft up in the air? Ike's 110mph winds are measured at ground level-up 260ft they would be considerably faster. Buoys were measuring, IIRC, 135mph winds at 122m when Ike was still a 105mph storm.

This article talks about the stadium design and says that the roof was supposed to withstand winds up to 120 mph. The desire to make Reliant more of a multipurpose facility than a pure football field (it hosts more rodeo events per year than NFL games) seems to have a lot to do with why it wasn't set up to have an open roof indefinitely. The floor without the drainage system is probably a lot more useful for non-football events.

Rice Stadium may be the next best option but I don't think it's a real attractive one for the team. Even if every Reliant ticketholder gets a seat at Rice, Rice would clearly be a step down in quality for the fan -- sightlines, benches instead of seats, no luxury boxes (right?), fewer concessions and bathrooms, less parking and access for traffic, no video screens (right?) etc. The team would need to do something to make up the difference to the fans, not to mention the hit it would take in lost signage, video, and other in-stadium advertising revenue.

The typical outdoor football field is built on a "crown" where the area between the hashmarks is higher up than the sidelines. That's so rain can flow down to the sidelines and provide better traction in the middle of the field.

In domed facilities, the crown is not needed so they were built without one, all the better to stage non-football events. I think that's the real issue here although I see it being a factor only if the game was played in a downpour. Excessive rains might also flood the field level seats closest to the sidelines.

But if the roof is the only thing wrong and the sod is portable, I just don't see why it would matter to the point of relocating the game. Football was designed to be played in adverse weather conditions.