University of Kansas | Football

A Field Worthy of a Reimagined Stadium

David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium first opened in 1921, which made it one of the oldest venues in major college football. By the 2020s it had fallen well behind the modern stadiums Kansas competes against, and the university launched a top-to-bottom redevelopment of the facility as the centerpiece of its new Gateway District, an effort to reshape the north edge of campus and give the football program a home that could compete for fans, recruits, and revenue in the Big 12. The scope was significant enough that the Jayhawks played their 2024 home games away from Lawrence while crews rebuilt the venue, returning in 2025 to new seating, upgraded concourses, premium club areas, and a conference center. 

That stadium redevelopment was a massive, multi-phase undertaking carried out by a team of firms. MMTH’s charge within the redevelopment was singular and specific: the playing field. And that piece carried real weight. A program coming off its strongest stretch of football in years was returning to a showcase venue, and the surface at the center of it needed to both look the part and perform at the highest level. KU Athletics did not want a standard green field with a logo dropped at midfield. They wanted a design that was unmistakably Kansas, and in the words of Director of Athletics Travis Goff, distinctive within college football itself, a surface that would be seen by tens of millions of viewers every season. 

The field also came with the tightest of timelines. The university held its commencement ceremony on the old field on Sunday, May 18, 2025, so MMTH could not begin until the graduates had walked. And this was no simple resurface. The job required a complete conversion: tearing out the old field, its entire sub base, and the existing drainage, then rebuilding the system from the ground up and delivering a game-ready surface before the season opener. The clock ran in weeks, not months. 

Built Right, Start To Finish

MMTH broke ground the day after graduation, beginning excavation on Monday, May 19, 2025, and turned a finished field over to the university on July 31, 2025, a build window of just over two months. As a true design-build partner, MMTH acted as the engineer of record, general contractor, and construction manager for the field, and self-performed the work from full design to installation. The MMTH crews ran two shifts, with workers typically on site from roughly 5 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week, absorbing several days of weather delays without giving up the deadline. 

MMTH did not simply lay down new turf. The team rebuilt the field from the ground up. Out came the old surface, its base, and its drainage, and in their place MMTH engineered a new foundation, then topped it with a Shaw Sports Turf GAME ON system chosen for how it plays and how it protects athletes. The new field drains fast enough to keep games going through weather that would sideline other surfaces. The work also reached well beyond the turf: new hydraulic goal posts and safety netting, conduit for power and cabling routed beneath the field with access points at the 15, 50, and 15-yard lines, and a wide, heavy-duty concrete perimeter running along the west wall and wrapping around the north and east sides. Every layer, from the base to the final blade, was built for performance and safety first. 

That single-team ownership of the field, from the first line of design to the last panel of turf, is what KU valued most. 

Unmistakably Kansas

The look is where the field became a statement. Working shoulder to shoulder with KU Athletics and head coach Lance Leipold, MMTH’s Design and Creative teams pushed through hundreds of iterations to land on something clean, modern, and timeless. The end zones carry sublimated wheat fields, a nod to the state’s agricultural heritage and to the KU fan tradition of waving the wheat after every score. The playing surface alternates between two subtly different greens every five yards, a custom touch that reads as professional and intentional. Blue end zones frame a bold white “KANSAS” wordmark, and thin red strokes trace the end zones out to the 25-yard lines. On the sidelines, stacked “Rock Chalk” and “Jayhawk” wordmarks anchor the team areas. 

At midfield sits the classic, primary Jayhawk. With fan sentiment split between the modern mark and the beloved 1941 Warhawk, KU chose brand consistency using the same iconic logo that sits at center court in Allen Fieldhouse and remains one of the most recognized marks in all of sports. The MMTH logo appears at both 25-yard lines, the sign of a genuine business-to-business partnership that puts a Kansas-built company on the field it built. 

None of it would look the way it does without Shaw’s GAME ON technology. Rather than cutting and inlaying separate pieces of turf for every logo, design variation, and line, GAME ON technology tufts the graphics and markings directly into the surface in a single run. That matters for more than just looks. Traditional fields with inlay work can only manage a color or two before the seams multiply, and the intricate, multi-color wheat pattern, with its complex shapes and shades of blues turning direction across the field, would have meant an unimaginable number of seams and a field full of potential failure points. Tufting it in eliminates those seams and cuts, which makes the field safer, more durable, and far lower maintenance, with nothing to peel up over time and no lines to repaint. 

Tested, Not Assumed 

MMTH and Shaw Sports Turf did not just claim that the field performed. They proved it. Shaw’s research team ran the field through its PEAK Playability Assessment, a battery of tests measuring the three pillars of surface performance: impact attenuation, traction, and stiffness. Technicians drew on motion-capture sensors, a national database of high-quality competition fields, and days of on-field testing so thorough that one KU administrator joked the equipment looked like it was set up to chase tornadoes. 

The numbers backed up the design. The field returned an average Gmax of 123 and an average head injury criterion value of 984 at a 3-foot-6-inch fall height, well within the range of elite, safe playing surfaces. The Kansas staff came out and put the field through its own evaluation, checking whether it truly measured up on the two things that matter most: how it plays and how it keeps athletes safe. 

For a program that puts performance and safety ahead of look and branding, the verdict was the payoff. 

Home Turf Advantage

What Kansas has now is a field that performs as good as it looks. From the very first practice the surface played fast, soft, and game-ready. Players asked to hold every practice in the stadium. And beyond game day, the field has become a recruiting and branding asset that signals how seriously Kansas invests in its athletes. 

The stadium field is the most visible chapter in a relationship that has been building for years. MMTH has delivered field after field for Kansas Athletics, starting with the indoor football practice facility, then the Jayhawks’ indoor and outdoor softball complex, completed in December 2022, and their baseball field, completed in December 2024, before the new Kivisto Field opened in August 2025. That track record is what made the next step a natural one. The University of Kansas became the first school to join MMTH 360, MMTH’s exclusive strategic partnership program, making KU the flagship of a model built to move past one-off projects into a lasting alliance that helps the school align its facilities with its broader institutional goals. 

From a graduation ceremony on the old field to a game-ready statement piece in just over two months, MMTH gave Kansas Football a home turf advantage worthy of the moment.