Some seats, yes. For a typical July 1:10 PM day game at Mountain America Stadium, roughly 36% of the seating bowl is shaded on average across the event. Shade grows through the late afternoon; by 6:00 PM about 84% of seats are out of the sun.
Check YOUR seat for YOUR event →Typical July afternoon highs at Mountain America Stadium are around 108°F. Shade selection genuinely matters for comfort and safety.
No. Mountain America Stadium is open air.
Mountain America Stadium (Tempe, AZ) is oriented 14° from true north. We compute the sun's exact position for your date and start time and run it against the seating geometry, plus live schedules and an hour-by-hour forecast on the interactive site.
Interactive shade map for Mountain America Stadium · Satellite shadow view
The team is named for the sun, and the numbers back it up. Tempe afternoons average 109°F in August and still 100°F in September, the hottest early-season conditions in major college football, and Mountain America Stadium, the building long known as Sun Devil Stadium, set between the desert buttes near the Arizona State campus, is open to the sky. At an early-afternoon kickoff in high summer the sun stands 76 degrees up in the southwest, and a game starting around 1:10 PM averages only 36 percent shade across the stadium's 53,599 seats.
The engine's most shaded sections are all on the club level: 214 leads at 53 percent shade across an afternoon game, with 215, 216, and 217 at 52 percent and 206 and 207 at 50. The sunniest seats are in the lower bowl, sections 103, 104, 131, and 132 all average 27 percent shade. In September heat, that gap is not a comfort detail; it's the whole ballgame. If you can only control one variable about your ticket, make it overhead cover.
Evening rescues this stadium. By 7 PM in midsummer the sun sits just 6 degrees above the horizon in the west-northwest, and from 6 PM onward 84 percent of the seats are shaded. Sunset comes at 7:38 PM, Arizona skips daylight saving time, so the sun goes down earlier by the clock than in neighboring states, and desert air sheds heat fast once it does. A night kickoff in Tempe starts hot and finishes tolerable; a noon or 3:30 kickoff in August or September is the most punishing sit in the sport.
Pregame in the shade you can find, not the lot you're assigned, asphalt tailgating under a 100°F sun drains you before kickoff. Freeze your water bottles the night before. Sunscreen every exposed surface, wear a wide hat, and check on the people around you; heat illness at this scale of exposure is a real, recurring thing, not a hypothetical. By late October the danger fades, Tempe drops to 88°F afternoons in October and 77°F in November, when sitting in the sun becomes the pleasant option.
Before buying anything for a game before mid-October, put your date and section into the interactive shade map. At Mountain America Stadium, a few sections' difference can mean an entire afternoon of shade you otherwise won't get.
Upcoming events at Mountain America Stadium are ticketed on TixBit. Check the shade map first, then grab a seat on the shady side.