“Thank you for the best night of my life,” Zach Bryan told the crowd on Saturday night (Sept. 27) at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor — which is saying something for a guy who’s had a lot of those during the past seven years.
The 27-song, nearly three-hour show, the 29-year-old country star’s last of 2025, made history on a couple of levels. It was the first-ever full-scale concert at the home of the Michigan Wolverines, known as the Big House, in its 98-year history. It’s also expected to be the largest ticketed concert ever in the U.S., breaking the mark of 110,905 set by country singer George Strait at Texas A&M’s King Field in College Station in June 2024.
An official attendance for Bryan’s show has not been announced, but concert organizers said it had sold more than 112,000 tickets after its Valentine’s Day on-sale sold out completely. Michigan Stadium has an official capacity of 107,601, but additional seating around the center-field stage — the same one Strait played on in Texas — made breaking the record seem entirely likely. The venue has also hosted up to 115,109 for a football game against Notre Dame during September of 2013, along with other events that have drawn more than 112,000.
Rest assured that setting a record was a big part of what Saturday’s show was about. Michigan Stadium has long been a holy grail of venues, with an administration that eschewed the idea of a concert on sacred football ground.
“Twenty, 30 years ago there was this, ‘We’re not gonna do that. It’s sacrilegious’ sort of thing,” Rob Rademacher, chief operating officer of Michigan Athletics, tells Billboard.
But as those figures — among them legendary Michigan football coach and athletic director Bo Schembechler — passed away, and a new era of revenue-sharing collegiate athletics took hold, university officials became more amenable to utilizing the stadium for other events, including outdoor hockey games and soccer matches.
Rademacher said the school began looking at concerts seriously during the early 2000s, and that “10 years ago we were right at the goal line” — reportedly for a Bob Seger concert — “and we got stuffed at fourth (down) and one. For a number of reasons it didn’t happen.”
The idea of the Bryan show was hatched last fall when Aware Records founder Gregg Latterman, now an educator and executive director of Michigan’s Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurship at Michigan’s Ross School of Business, helped facilitate conversations between the school and AEG Presents. An initial desire to have Eminem christen the Big House for concerts did not work out, but AEG, Bryan’s regular promoter, put him in place for the event.
“Zach just wants to do really cool thing,” Rich Schaefer, AEG president of global touring, says. “Coming to Michigan, taking a swing at the (Strait record) was number one on the list. We couldn’t figure out a better place to do it than here.”
Michigan’s Rademacher acknowledged that “we needed to make sure the first (concert) was big. That was really what was driving the conversation from our end. We needed a sellout. We wanted to set a record. They brought in Zach.”
While the school suggested a summer play, AEG insisted on staging the concert during the fall semester, when students would be on campus to help bolster ticket sales.
“It was really more important to sell it out and break the record than it was to make a lot of money,” said Schaefer, noting that some 76,000 tickets were priced under $50 to make them more affordable to students. Interestingly, he added, those were the tickets that sold out first, mostly during a pre-sale for students and season ticket holders, while the more expensive seats moved during the regular on-sale.
Tickets for the show were purchased in all 50 U.S. states, according to AEG. It was the 16th and final show for Bryant — a light but eventful year that included headlining the Stagecoach festival during April, concerts in London and Dublin, Ireland and three sold-out shows at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.
The smooth-running event in Ann Arbor played like a mini-festival, with six acts — including hand-picked Bryan favorites John Mayer and Ryan Bingham & the Texas Gentlemen — providing nearly seven hours of music, ending with a full fireworks display as Bryan and his band romped through a lengthy encore rendition of “Revival.”
As the formal announcement of the attendance record looms, here are the most memorable moments from another historic win at the Big House.
