It’s official: football is making a return to Wrigley Field.

The Chicago Cubs and Northwestern U. held a press conference at Wrigley Field on Thursday to announce a football game between U. Illinois and Northwestern at the Friendly Confines on Nov. 20.

Representatives from the Cubs, Wildcats and Chicago Bears were on hand to speak in detail about the event, which has been in the works for about two years.

The contest will be the first football game at Wrigley Field since the Bears called it home from 1921 to 1970. Illinois and Northwestern played at Wrigley in 1923.

The football field will run from right field to the third-base dugout. The biggest issue for this game was safety.

“I know (safety) was the one thing that (Illinois athletic director Ron Guenther) had mentioned was that – the safety,” Illinois head coach Ron Zook told the media Friday. “There’s a tight corner or two, but they’ll do the things that they have to do for the safety of the players and obviously they’re not gonna put the players’ safety in jeopardy.”

The football field will barely fit on the Wrigley Field surface – the fencing around the dugout will be removed and plywood, sand and dirt will extend the playing surface to be regulation length.

“The critical question really remained before we could even talk about whether we could get a deal done was could we safely, in this environment, put a regulation football field at Wrigley Field?” Northwestern athletic director Jim Phillips said.

Tickets will be handled similarly to normal Northwestern home games. The Wildcats will have more than 30,000 tickets, while 8,000 will be split between the Cubs and Illini. Illinois will likely have 3,000 tickets for the game, leaving the Cubs with 5,000 tickets.

Northwestern head coach Pat Fitzgerald doesn’t buy into the theory that Illini fans will buy up all of Northwestern’s tickets and fill Wrigley Field with orange shirts.

“I believe, contrary to some popular beliefs, that this place will be purple and white,” Fitzgerald said. “I expect all 30,000 to be purple and white, otherwise people will get a personal e-mail and a knock on the door from me.”

Zook thinks Illinois fan attendance for the Wrigley game will be similar to when the Illini play Northwestern at Ryan Field, when plenty of orange can be seen in the stands.

“I hope to see a lot of orange and blue,” Zook said. “I know when we played up there before there was a lot of orange and blue, so that would hopefully be the same way.

The locker rooms were another logistical problem for officials to tackle. Baseball locker rooms are not built to accommodate the number of players on a football roster.

“There will be a staging area with their pads and uniforms, and then I’m not sure if the entire club will dress in one place or they’ll dress in some auxiliary rooms,” Cubs president Crane Kenney said.

The football game follows a recent trend of Wrigley Field hosting non-baseball events. Live music concerts and the 2009 NHL Winter Classic between the Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings have brought more variety to the Confines.

“We like to stretch our skin a little bit,” Kenney said. “The concerts in ’05 were the first time we tried it, and then hockey was next. There’s been a lot of different events here … there’s been ski jumping, there’s been rodeo, there’s been boxing.”

Zook and Guenther, who Kenney called two “cheerleaders” for the Wrigley game, have been on board with the plan from the start.

“I do think it’ll be an exciting venue to play in, and I think our fans will enjoy it,” Zook said.