Blue Jackets to host Red Wings next season at ‘The Shoe’
After a long wait, Ohio Stadium will finally play host to a different type of Ohio-Michigan battle.
According to a league source, the NHL will finally take it outdoors in Columbus with a March 1, 2025 matchup between the Blue Jackets and Detroit Red Wings at Ohio State’s historic stadium – which can hold more than 110,000 for football games.
Long dubbed “The Horseshoe” or “The Shoe” because of its original horseshoe shape, Ohio Stadium has a rich athletic history since its introduction in 1922 on OSU’s campus. Along with the Buckeyes’ football team, the facility has hosted numerous big events — not to mention OSU students who lived there as a dormitory — during its 101-year life.
Jesse Owens ran track for the Buckeyes at Ohio Stadium in the 1930s. The Columbus Crew first called “The Shoe” home as Major League Soccer’s charter franchise. Multiple artists have hosted concerts there, including Pink Floyd (1988, 1994), Billy Joel and Elton John (1994), U2 (1997), The Rolling Stones (1997, 2015) plus Taylor Swift (2018), Beyoncé and Jay-Z (2018) and Morgan Wallen (2023) more recently.
Now it will host the Blue Jackets and their fans, who’d grown skeptical of an outdoor game happening in Columbus due to OSU’s reluctance to “winterize” the stadium’s plumbing for events beyond the end of college football in late November.
That’s apparently no longer an issue, which cleared the path for an NHL game in Columbus that will be the league’s third premiere event in the city — following the 2007 NHL draft and 2015 NHL all-star game.
The Blue Jackets, along with the Arizona Coyotes and Florida Panthers, are one of three NHL teams to not yet participate in one of the league’s 39 — soon to be 41 — outdoor games since the first NHL Winter Classic on Jan. 1, 2008 between the Buffalo Sabres and Pittsburgh Penguins at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, New York.
The Jackets getting an NHL Stadium Series matchup was first reported last week by
Hockey News Columbus. ESPN’s John Buccigross took it a step further Wednesday with a Twitter/X post confirming the report and including the matchup. The Athletic confirmed the matchup and date late Wednesday, citing a league source, and the Dispatch followed suit. It’s unknown when the NHL and the two teams will make it official, but the game is scheduled.
The timing of the scheduled date for the game has two potential concerns.
The first is the weather in Central Ohio in early March. Rain is always a possibility around that time of year, but temperatures also vary widely. It can be 20 to 25 degrees colder or warmer on an alternating daily basis, but it’s usually about 20 degrees colder at night.
The average evening temperature in Columbus during the past five years on March 1 was a brisk 36.9 degrees, which is plenty cold enough to set up a usable outdoor hockey rink — especially with the NHL’s vast experience doing it now. The other potential snag is The Arnold Classic, the annual multisport exposition named after Arnold Schwarzenegger that features competitions in professional bodybuilding, strongman, fitness and other physique-oriented events.
That popular event has graced Columbus since 1989, drawing large numbers of people downtown around the same weekend of the NHL’s proposed game in 2025 between the Blue Jackets and Red Wings. That could make it challenging for hockey fans and those coming to Columbus for the Arnold Classic to secure hotel rooms, but there’s still time to assess possible conflicts.
That could’ve been avoided, of course, had the Blue Jackets instead hosted an NHL Winter Classic on New Year’s Day, but Ohio State doesn’t want an NHL event taking attention away from the Buckeyes’ football team on that date. The Blue Jackets are just happy to head across town for an outdoor game on any day, which begs the question:
Will the famed cannon inside Nationwide Arena make the trip?