WACO — First there was the dream, then the artist’s drawings followed by two years of construction along Interstate 35.

The finished product that is McLane Stadium still overwhelmed Baylor football coach Art Briles at a team scrimmage earlier this month.

“I dreamed too small,” Briles said. “I envisioned something, but my visions weren’t reality. The reality is much grander, much better and more magnificent. It’s an unbelievable facility.”

The $266 million facility adjacent to campus and the Brazos River will host its first Baylor game Sunday when SMU visits. The 45,000-seat stadium is smallish by major-college standards but a good fit for Baylor, a private school with 13,300 undergraduates. Aledo and Cedar Park christened the stadium on Friday, which also functioned as a dry run.

Athletic director Ian McCaw has called the stadium representative of Baylor’s football emergence nationally.

During a recent interview with Waco’s KRZI-AM (1660) from a pontoon boat on the Brazos, school president Ken Starr recalled that in his first conversation with Briles in 2010, the coach called an on-campus stadium “a need and not a want.”

The stadium also represents another major step for a program that has enjoyed a meteoric rise under Briles after decades of doormat status.

Aging Floyd Casey Stadium might have been the home for Grant Teaff’s Miracle on the Brazos, but it was also nestled amid strip malls and super markets, a couple of miles from campus.

Former Waco Tribune-Herald sports editor Dave Campbell, 89, attended his first Baylor game in 1935 and recalled all the attempts to dress up Floyd Casey.

“There’s just no comparison,” Campbell said at a stadium tour earlier this month. “It’s two different worlds.”

McLane Stadium now serves as an identifying landmark.

“Baylor is using what it’s got,” Briles said. “What we have is a great location being in central Texas, we’ve got the Brazos River and we have I-35. When you have something, you use it to your advantage.”

The stadium will allow Baylor to keep pace in the great facilities race.

TCU, Texas, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech have expanded or renovated their stadiums in the last decade. Texas A&M is spending $450 million to renovate Kyle Field. Oklahoma is looking at a nearly $400 million face lift to Owen Field. Houston opened its new TDECU Stadium on Friday.

For recruits, Baylor can showcase its home without apologies or explanations.

While there aren’t any over-the-top touches like waterfalls and player barbershops, McLane Stadium isn’t exactly stodgy. Flat screens and a giant projection TV highlight a ground-floor recruiting room with a view of the field.

The 50-yard-long home locker room is shaped like a football.

Wi-Fi will blanket the stadium and be a key part of a stadium app providing multiple replay angles.

“It’s got a huge impact,” Briles said. “It already has. That’s just the reality. We sold hope, vision and faith prior. Now we’ve got reality and production.”

Fittingly one of the events planned is the dedication of a bronze statue of Robert Griffin III, the school’s only Heisman Trophy winner. The current Washington Redskins quarterback is scheduled to attend the ceremony south of the stadium.

Griffin’s Heisman season in 2011 was a key part of the 2011-12 “Year of the Bear,” which also included an Elite Eight run in men’s basketball and an NCAA women’s basketball title. The success bred interest, and former Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane made the lead donation for the new stadium.

At first, McLane wanted the new facility to be called Baylor Stadium before allowing his name to be used after prodding by Baylor officials and Briles.

Baylor officials did extensive research, McCaw said, visiting new and renovated stadiums, adapting the best ideas into the Populus-designed structure. Other parts of the stadium will be unique, including the Umphrey Pedestrian Bridge connecting the campus to the stadium and boat slips that will allow what is being called “sailgaiting.”

At the peak of construction, more than 850 workers were on the site daily.

Now, Baylor must establish the same home-field advantage it built at Floyd Casey. For all the jokes about the stadium and the infamous end-zone tarp, Baylor won 19 of its last 20 games there.

A canopy will shade about half the stadium and also will serve to hold in noise.

“Old Cleveland Municipal was that way, and I think they designed it that way to hold the noise in,” SMU coach June Jones said.

Ranked 10th in the AP and Amway coaches polls, Baylor is fully capable of carving out its own home-field edge. Players were practically giddy for the team’s first scrimmage there.

“It’s going to change the environment around the entire campus,” senior linebacker Bryce Hager said.

Briles told them to treat it as a personal historic moment and document it with their cell phones.

“We’ve got a stadium because of what we’ve done in the past, and I don't think it’s changed our mentality at all,” said quarterback Bryce Petty, who enters the season as a Heisman candidate. “We want to defend it.”

Opening day events

The schedule of public events for Baylor’s first game Sunday at McLane Stadium against SMU:

8 a.m. — Tailgating and sailgating begin at the stadium

3:15 p.m. — Dedication of a statue to Heisman winner Robert Griffin III just south of the stadium

4 p.m. — Bear Walk

4:30 p.m. — McLane Stadium gates open

6:20 p.m. — Invocation by Robert Griffin III, who will then escort George W. Bush, wife Laura and the Drayton McLane family to midfield for the pregame coin toss by President Bush.

6:37 p.m. — Opening kickoff.

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