How Daily’s Place Represents the Future of NFL Brand Expansion

Walk into Daily’s Place, the City of Jacksonville’s and Jacksonville Jaguars’ new complex, and your gaze immediately floats upward. That’s where more than 150,000 square feet of fabric unfolds, waving like the city’s iconic waterways.

The canvas is blank by design, with LED lights ready to turn its off-white shade nearly any color in the rainbow. It’s a fitting metaphor for the unpreceded amphitheater and flex field duo woven into the south end zone of TIAA Bank Field. Daily’s Place plays a variety of positions.

The hometown Tedeschi Trucks Band opened the 5,500-seat amphitheater to a raucous crowd this past Memorial Day weekend. Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds followed a few days later. Meanwhile, the Jags recently christened the flex field when the team’s training camp opened for the 2017 season.

The word “flex” is in the name for a reason, with 53-foot hangar doors opening to reveal a stage shared by both spaces. Large-scale events like graduations and trade shows will temporarily set up shop on the field and use the platform to draw the Jacksonville community together.

The two venues also share one distinctive roof. Its more than 3,000 tons of steel came together in roughly half the time of similar builds thanks to a disciplined workflow. The result is a silhouette true to Jacksonville.

“The entire structure visually ties into the nearby Hart Bridge,” says Jonathan Mallie, design principal for the project. “By layering the roof’s fabric underneath the steel structure, it flows uninterrupted from the perspective of the spectators below”.

More importantly, the complex draws more people to downtown Jacksonville. The central business district lies roughly a mile directly to the west. In between is space ripe for development that will keep the city’s urban renaissance humming well into the future.

“We have a belief that the more people that work downtown, the more people that visit downtown and the more people that live downtown, all of those will benefit the Jaguars,” Jaguars President Mark Lamping recently told The Florida Times-Union. “One part of that strategy is to get more events downtown.”

On that front, momentum has quickly materialized. The amphitheater has already booked more than 30 shows for this calendar year. The flex field, meanwhile, is set to welcome events like the annual Florida-Georgia game as well as the TaxSlayer Bowl.

According to Chad Johnson, the Jaguar’s vice president of sales, three out of four people buying tickets to Daily’s Place have never been to a Jags game. Because of that fact, the big picture being painted by the new complex might not be on full display until Sundays this fall.

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