NFL History | RCA Dome Site, Indianapolis — The Building Came Before the Team

Indianapolis broke ground on a domed stadium in May 1982. The roof was inflated in August 1983. The Baltimore Colts moved to Indianapolis in March 1984, and the building opened two months after that, in May. The order of those four dates is the argument of this entry: the city put up the building first and acquired the tenant second.

The money came from an unusual mixture. The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis records $25 million from Lilly Endowment, Inc. and $5 million from Krannert Charitable Trust, alongside a $47 million municipal bond repaid through a one per cent food and beverage tax levied in Marion County. Two private philanthropies and a county food and beverage tax, for a stadium with 61,000 seats. The same entry records that Robert Irsay cited the dome's construction among his reasons for moving the club; that is the encyclopedia's attribution of his motive, not this entry's. The Colts played their first game in the Hoosier Dome on 11 August 1984, a preseason fixture against New York. RCA bought the naming rights in 1994, and the building carried that name for the game described below.

On 21 January 2007 the RCA Dome held the AFC Championship Game. Pro-Football-Reference's box score gives the venue as the RCA Dome, the attendance as 57,433, and a line score in which New England led 21-6 at the end of the second quarter and lost 38-34. The Colts had finished 12-4 in the regular season, per the season page rather than the box-score header, and the same season page records the club winning the Super Bowl that season, 29-17, over Chicago. Note that the seating figure above is the building's as recorded at its 1984 opening and the attendance figure is from 2007; twenty-three years separate them, no source consulted here gives the building's capacity in 2007, and the two numbers are printed side by side rather than reconciled.

The club's last season in the building was 2007. Pro-Football-Reference records a 13-3 finish and a home divisional-round loss to San Diego, 28-24, on 13 January 2008. Lucas Oil Stadium opened on 16 August 2008. The RCA Dome's roof was deflated on 24 September 2008 and the structure was imploded on 20 December 2008. The cleared ground became the fourth expansion of the Indiana Convention Center, completed in 2011.

What replaced it inverted the sequence. The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis puts Lucas Oil Stadium at $720 million, with roughly $100 million from the Colts and the remaining $620 million in municipal bonds repaid through taxes levied in Indianapolis, Marion County and nine surrounding counties. The second time, the club was already in the city and contributed to the cost. For 1982 the sources consulted here record no club contribution at all; the funding they do record is the two charitable grants and the bond.

The other end of the 1984 move is covered by another entry in this series, at the Baltimore ground that lost the franchise and later received a different one.

Status note, written September 2026: this entry describes the site as its sources describe it, the most recent of them revised in 2021. Nothing here establishes what stands on the ground today beyond the convention centre expansion completed in 2011.

Coordinate. 39.764268 N, 86.161900 W, from the United States Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder for 100 South Capitol Avenue, Indianapolis. This is one method, not two. A second TIGER query on 200 South Capitol Avenue returned 39.763653 N, 86.161919 W - the same longitude to four decimal places and about seventy metres south - which shows the geocoder is interpolating points along Capitol Avenue rather than locating a building. No municipal address-point layer for Indianapolis was reachable from this task, and the Historical Marker Database holds no marker for the Hoosier Dome or the RCA Dome. The precision radius is stated as plus or minus 350 metres, wide enough to contain the footprint of a 61,000-seat stadium set back from the street it was addressed on. That radius is a statement of uncertainty and not a measurement.

Cover image: U.S. Army photograph by Staff Sgt. Russell Klika, VIRIN 080103-A-0559K-034, via DVIDS, public domain. It is not a football photograph. It shows family members in the stands of the RCA Dome at the departure ceremony for the Indiana National Guard's 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, eleven months before the building was demolished. The DVIDS record dates it 3 January 2008 in its metadata and in its VIRIN while the caption text reads 2 January; the disagreement is left unresolved here. The DVIDS location field names Edinburgh, Indiana, which is the photographing unit's base at Camp Atterbury; the caption places the ceremony at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, and the caption is what this entry relies on.

Second image: the same ceremony, showing a performer with the dome's interior signage band and upper structure behind him. DVIDS lists the photographer as Staff Sgt. Russell Klika, but the caption's own credit line reads Spc. Austen Hurt and the VIRIN, 080103-A-9871H-004, carries an H. Both names are given here because the record disagrees with itself. Public domain.