“Well, I’ll tell you,” Williams said Friday. “We got a lot more interest than we thought we would.”

To the residents, who voted 63 percent in favor of a $119 million bond in May 2009, this project, which includes the stadium, an auditorium for fine arts and a service center for the district, is designed to scale. Their scale just happens to be larger than most.

Allen is the third-biggest high school in both Texas and in its area, which includes two larger schools in nearby Plano. It has more than 5,000 students in grades 9 to 12, more than 600 members in the nation’s largest high school band and a campus that spreads across 650,000 square feet.

On football Friday nights, the lucky ones fill the bleachers at the current stadium. Cars park for miles down the street, where the aroma of barbecue is the local perfume. The scene is straight from “Friday Night Lights,” the overcrowded version. Tom Westerberg, who became Allen’s head coach in 2004, said he could remember only four home defeats in his tenure.

“It’s controlled chaos,” said Anthony Gibson, the school’s fine arts director. “There’s an energy you can’t describe. When they say football is like religion in Texas, it’s true. From little kids all the way to the Super Bowl, we do football right.”