Bank of America Stadium
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Bank of America Stadium is a football stadium located in uptown Charlotte, North Carolina. It is the home facility of the Carolina Panthers NFL franchise. It also hosts the annual Meineke Car Care Bowl which features teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big East.
The Panthers played their Inaugural Season at Clemson University's Memorial Stadium while the stadium was being completed.
The organization had considered several possible sites for the stadium's location prior to choosing the Charlotte center city site. One was near NASCAR's Lowes Motor Speedway and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in northeast Mecklenburg County. Another was at the intersection of I-85 and US-74 in western Gaston County. A popular option was locating it near Paramount's Carowinds Amusement Park, with the 50 yard line being on the state border of North Carolina and South Carolina.
The Carolina Panthers played their first game at the stadium on September 14, 1996. The stadium sits on 33 acres (130,000 m²) of land and has a capacity of 73,298. Bank of America Stadium is mostly used as a football facility, though it hosted the Rolling Stones on October 10, 1997, and has been a site of the NCAA Men's Soccer Championship in 1999 and 2000. A Billy Graham crusade was held there as well.
The stadium, originally known as Carolinas Stadium, opened in 1996, as Ericsson Stadium after the Swedish telecom company purchased naming rights to the stadium. The Panthers debuted there during the 1996 NFL season. In 2004, the stadium received its current name after Bank of America purchased the naming rights for 20 years.
Since Bank of America has acquired naming rights, many fans now refer to the stadium as "The Vault" or "The Bank".
The Panther's are undefeated in playoff games at Bank of America Stadium. In 1996, on their way to their first NFC Championship Game, they defeated the defending Super Bowl Champion Dallas Cowboys. Again they defeated the Cowboys on their way to Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston in 2004.
Bank of America Stadium was a finalist to host the annual ACC Football Championship Game, eventually losing the first four year contract to Jacksonville's ALLTEL Stadium. It is considered a prime candidate to reapply for the contract for the games after 2008 due to its central location in ACC territory, and the relatively mild winter climate of Charlotte.
At the time of its construction in the early 90's, the stadium was a pioneering project for the use of Personal Seat Licenses. It was the first large scale project funded and constructed in the USA using mostly PSL's. It was the strength of PSL pledges that impressed the NFL owners and resulted in the Carolinas receiving the first new expansion team in nearly two decades.
The stadium is also credited with being a major cause for the recent round of new stadium construction in the NFL. Only a decade after its construction, it already is in the oldest third of current NFL stadiums. Only nine other current NFL stadiums are older which have not received major renovations. The last two to open before the stadium broke ground was the Georgia Dome in 1992 and Dolphin Stadium in 1987. Twenty one other teams have moved into new facilities since it opened in 1996, averaging 1.9 new stadiums per year. It is a credit to the design's innovations, which have been copied in many of the newer stadiums, that no major upgrades are planned in the near future.
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