Forget about three yards and a cloud of dust. The first big play in rebuilding Stanford Stadium will involve 100,000 cubic yards of dirt.

The ground game will start in earnest after Dec. 10, when the two-week demolition of the 84-year-old stadium is scheduled to be finished. Even if shards of the old stadium are still around, the dirt will come.

"It'll be enough where we can get in and start making grade with our dirt," said construction project manager Tim Stitt of Vance Brown Builders in Palo Alto.

So begins a race to have the new stadium ready for the Sept. 9, 2006, home opener against San Jose State. And the game might be on real grass, not a synthetic surface as had been expected.

Moving, excavating and compacting the dirt will take about six weeks, Stitt said. About one-fourth of the dirt will come from around the stadium, with another 65,000 square yards coming from an excavation to make way for a physics building at Stanford, and the final 10,000 coming from land being cleared for a parking garage.

Preservationist Gail Woolley, a former Palo Alto mayor, said dirt was a big part of the original stadium's history and design. Three Stanford engineering professors, inspired by the architecture of amphitheaters in Pompeii, Italy, sunk the stadium into a berm of earth.

"They realized that if they designed the stadium by digging down and putting the dirt on the side, they wouldn't need much of a structure," Woolley said.