A record number of fans are turning out to see NCAA football and Division I school are expanding their home venues to cash in.
It's known throughout college football as the "Big House," and an argument could easily be made that Michigan Stadium on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor isn't big enough. Not yet, anyway.
Thanks to the addition of 5,000 seats in 1998, Michigan Stadium regained (following a one-year lapse) its longtime distinction as the largest college football venue in the country-with a listed capacity of 107,501. But whether the stadium is enormous or undersized depends on your point of view.
Last season, six crowds topping 110,000 managed to squeeze into the single-deck bowl, including an NCAA-record 111,575 when the Wolverines hosted arch-rival Ohio State in the home finale. A waiting list for general-public season tickets currently holds 10,000 names. Even faculty and staff who have joined the university within the past two years have been unable to secure a season ticket. Meanwhile, athletics officials continue to wrestle with questions regarding how many seats Michigan Stadium can supply and what its ticket-buying public demands.
Take out the part about being the biggest, and the stadium situation at Michigan is hardly unique. Ten of the 15 Division I schools to average 75,000 fans or more per game over the past four seasons have expanded their stadiums during that four-year period or are in the process of expanding. Still others are mulling expansion. So why the campus expansion explosion now, in an era when many National Football League franchises are holding firm on seating capacities or building scaled-down stadiums from scratch in the interest of intimacy? The answers range from selling prospective recruits on an image to cultivating a future fan base by accommodating teens and other young people in new, affordably priced seats. Another widely accepted response points to the affinity college football fans feel toward their teams.
That feeling turns to outright passion when the team in question represents a given fan's alma mater, which all the while is graduating thousands more potential lifelong supporters each year. Why not welcome them back to campus by making room in the old stadium?
Indeed, college football games are becoming more crowded. According to the NCAA, last season's total football attendance for all four divisions eclipsed 39 million for the first time in history. A record 29 million fans attended Division I games in 1999, up 1.4 million from the previous year.
Not lost in any of this, of course, is money. The 15 football programs that have led the nation in attendance since 1996-Michigan, Tennessee, Penn State, Ohio State, Florida, Georgia, Auburn, Louisiana State, South Carolina, Florida State, Wisconsin, Texas, Alabama, Nebraska and Notre Dame-each post average annual profits of around $14 million. And while football revenue comes from an increasingly diverse array of sources these days, ticket sales is still chief among them.
In fact, game-day gate receipts from football can make or break an athletic department's entire operating budget. "This is a $35-million-a-year business, and if my costs go up 3 percent a year, where does my income continue to come from?" asks Joe Dean, athletic director at Louisiana State, where Tiger Stadium's 10,600 additional seats and 70 new luxury suites have boosted capacity to 92,644 for the 2000 season. "The biggest income you have is from football. You could increase ticket prices, but if you add 10,000 to 15,000 seats to your stadium, obviously that's a hell of a lot of additional income each year over a long period of time."
When asked how Michigan athletics might function financially without 110,000 fans packing Michigan Stadium every home Saturday, Mike Stevenson, the school's senior associate athletic director in charge of facilities, says bluntly, "We'd be out of business." "Football is generating the total operating budget for all non-revenue sports," Stevenson adds. "Basketball makes a profit, and hockey makes a slight profit. Everything else-22 sports-is riding on the back of football."
But even a full stadium, no matter the size, can't guarantee financial success. Last year, Michigan was faced with a $3 million athletic budget deficit, caused in part by the addition of sports programs and by a $1.7 million radio advertising deal that went bust, Stevenson says. Even the addition of 5,000 stadium seats the previous year fell $630,000 short of initial annual revenue projections. Each seat was filled, but by students paying $14 per ticket, as opposed to the $35 charged the general public. According to Stevenson, student season ticket sales swelled from 14,000 in 1996 to 24,000 a year ago on the heels of an administrative mandate that individuals attending the university in Ann Arbor - or either of its branch campuses in Dearborn and Flint-be afforded the chance to attend games in Michigan Stadium. It has forced Michigan to make room for students and faculty this fall by stripping corporations of some of their seats, Stevenson says.
Searching for means to pick up the financial slack, officials are currently considering further changes to the Michigan Stadium experience-ticket price increases, seat licenses and in-stadium advertising-all of which have heretofore been taboo subjects in Ann Arbor. The most glaring departure from tradition would be the addition of skybox premium seating along the stadium's east side. "That has not been favorably received by our campus community and our executive officers and regents in the past," says Stevenson. "But I think our financial struggles of late are going to heighten some interest in that."
Like Michigan, Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., has seen its share of on-field football success in recent years. In fact, the Thundering Herd lays claim to being the winningest college program of the '90s. But unlike Michigan, which has sold out every home game since the mid-'70s, Marshall's average per-game home attendance last year - as the Herd was mounting a 13-0 campaign that would earn it a postseason top-10 ranking-fell just short of Marshall University Stadium's capacity of 30,000.
Why, then, would Marshall choose to expand the stadium by some 8,000 seats for the 2000 season? "There were those few games that we were under 29,000, but there were times when we couldn't let any more people in," says Mike Bianchin, Marshall's assistant athletic director for game operations and facilities. "We were to the point of turning away loyal fans because we just couldn't get any more people in the stadium. That's not smart business." Marshall's stadium expansion begets the spoils of a football program that has come of age, according to Athletic Director Lance West. "If you're averaging 80 percent of your facility's capacity, you're doing pretty well," West says. "We are right around the 95th to 98th percentile, and expansion enhances our scheduling opportunities, our ability to generate more revenue and our ability to increase our marketing in areas that we can continue to grow in-family plans, youth tickets, corporate tickets and special promotions."
To a greater extent, the question of why has confronted officials at Iowa State University following their recent decision to increase capacity of Jack Trice Stadium to 50,000 by 2002, despite the fact that the Cyclones have averaged 38,592 spectators per game over the past four years in a facility that currently holds 43,000 permanent seats. Like Marshall, Iowa State argues that its marquee home games alone justify expansion. For example, last year's Iowa-Iowa State game jammed Jack Trice with 50,402 fans, many of whom sat on temporary endzone bleachers or on grass hillsides located in the stadium's corners.
The $14 million stadium upgrade will make obsolete such makeshift game-day seating arrangements, according to former ISU Athletic Director Gene Smith, who says the term "expansion" in this case is really a misnomer. Smith, who championed the expansion project before leaving Iowa State in August to become Arizona State's athletic director, points out that new permanent bleachers in the south end zone of Jack Trice will not only increase the stadium's capacity for football, but also house practice facilities for ISU basketball and volleyball underneath the added seats.
However, unlike Marshall, the self-proclaimed team of the decade, Iowa State failed to post a single winning season during the '90s. Smith, a Notre Dame football alum, expects the Cyclones' football fortunes to change starting this fall, and he wanted the stadium ready to meet demand two years down the road. "In this business, you have to have a vision of where you want to be," he says.
Vision allowed Marshall to expand its stadium with relative ease, according to West. Built in 1991, Marshall University Stadium met Division I-A specs before the Thundering Herd was even competing at that level. Moreover, the stadium floor was situated below grade, making the addition of decks to the stadium's superstructure more feasible since they didn't need to be constructed high off the ground. As a result, the project reportedly will cost a modest $2.5 million. "We're lucky," says Bianchin. "Most stadiums around the country right now that are getting expanded were built between 1940 and 1950, so their renovations are a lot different than ours in that we're more modernized. The steel structure, the electrical, everything was pretty much already to today's standards."
A very different scenario has unfolded at Ohio State, where the first major renovation in the 78-year history of Ohio Stadium is far more complex-not to mention expensive. The stadium's trademark running track has been removed and the playing surface lowered 14 feet, 6 inches. That made room for a fieldlevel ring of premium seating, but it also required the installation of a slurry wall - a 45-foot-deep, concrete-filled trench - around a playing surface that now rests more than 9 feet below the water table. Next year, stadium aisles will be widened to meet ADA standards, a measure that will require the removal of some 7,000 seats. To compensate, new outer walls along the stadium's east and west sides will accommodate new seats in the uppermost of three stadium decks. Suites will be added along the west side, as well.
Design complexity notwithstanding, the high-profile nature of the renovation project presented OSU officials with their first major challenge last summer-finding contractors interested in tackling the job. "Buckeye football is Buckeye football, and if there's a religion in town, I'm not sure this isn't it," says Jill Morelli, an assistant vice president and university architect at OSU. "You instantly eliminated those firms that were too small, because the size of the project was so large, but then you also eliminated those who said, 'I can get lower-risk work elsewhere, so why shouldn't I do that?' So for a combination of reasons-high-risk job, large project, hot economy-we were looking at a limited number of bidders."
Amid all the change, OSU officials aren't sure what the new seating capacity will be once work is completed next summer, but the ballpark figure stands at 97,000, up from 89,841. The cost of the renovation (which also includes amenities such as a new scoreboard, a press box, a band room and additional locker and rest rooms) will be a whopping $187 million-still a more desirable alternative to the $300 million to $400 million officials estimate a new stadium would cost. Revenue from the sale of club seats, luxury suites and increased concessions and ticket revenue will finance the project.
Projects of this magnitude are often financed through private donations. Louisiana State has taken that concept a step further, however, by allowing the Tiger Athletic Foundation, a 2,000-member booster group that boasts $8 million in annual revenue, to pony up the $45 million necessary to expand Tiger Stadium. In exchange, the foundation was given control of all 70 luxury suites and all but 1,000 of the seats in the stadium's new east-side upper deck. The expansion is expected to generate $2.5 million annually for the foundation. According to Dean, approaching the state to financially back the expansion would have required approval by a joint legislative budget committee, which would then have assigned a builder at a cost 20 percent greater than had the project been bid privately.
"It sounds ludicrous, but it's just the process, and you're kind of at the mercy of the system," Dean says. "Whereas you can play hardball the other way. You can say to an architect, 'If you want the job, here's what I'll pay you.' I mean, we played hardball like you wouldn't believe." Dean estimates that LSU's expansion would have cost the athletic department as much as $54 million had it been financed using state-backed bonds. "Our foundation agreed to do it," he says. "They picked the architect, they picked the builders, and they let them come in, make presentations and bid. It was an interesting process."
Five-year lease contracts on all 70 suites were snapped up. "If they didn't sell another seat, at least for five years, they'd still have enough income to meet the debt service," Dean says. Purchase of tickets in Tiger Stadium's new upper deck requires a donation-half of which goes to the foundation, the other half to Hibernia National Bank to pay the expansion debt faster than its scheduled 30- year service period. And just as a means of providing the bank some added insurance, the athletic department has established a $2 million contingency fund that the bank can tap if necessary. "There's not much collateral here," Dean says. "What are they going to do, take the institution's stadium away from it? You can see what they were loaning on here. It's almost good faith, because the state wasn't backing it."
One university among the nation's perennial football attendance leaders that hasn't jumped to expand is Wisconsin, though the timing would appear to be right. With the Badgers chasing a third consecutive Big Ten Conference championship this fall, the waiting list for season tickets at 76,129-seat Camp Randall Stadium has grown to more than 7,000 names. Associate Athletic Director Vince Sweeney says feasibility studies are currently being reviewed to assess not only updated seating possibilities, but overall infrastructure needs for a facility that opened in 1917.
"It's not an issue of people waiting to buy tickets, because that can change overnight," Sweeney says. "I think you want to look at it long term. We know we've had a problem with some fan-convenience things-ongoing facility issues on game days that continue to prompt us to look at whether there's anything we can do. What makes sense? If you want to work on the rest rooms, then you might want to look at putting in some suites or more seats, which will help pay for the whole project and bring in additional revenue. If you just want to fix the rest rooms, that's going to cost you a whole bunch of money, and there's no payback."
Improving the fan experience is a consideration not lost on officials in the process of expanding their school's football stadium. Ohio State's Morelli, for one, realizes that there are only so many fans Ohio Stadium can hold comfortably. "We looked at two things here," she says. "We looked not only at what we thought the building could support from a technical standpoint, but we also looked at the fan experience. How can we make that experience worth the price of a ticket? We can't do that by cantilevering them over the Olentangy River. So we have to have them feel the noise, and to do that we have to keep them closer.
"There are people at this university who feel we stopped short and we should have built it larger. However, it would be difficult for our facility to go much larger than it is right now, and all we would do is fuel somebody else to go bigger, because theirs would be easier to do than ours would be. It just got to be a game we decided not to play."
Officials at both Michigan and Tennessee - which, by virtue of a 10,642- seat expansion, assumed the top spot on the capacity list for the 1997 season - deny that they are involved in any kind of ongoing contest over stadium bragging rights. But the escalation continues nevertheless. This fall, Tennessee will open 78 new executive suites on the east side of Neyland Stadium, pushing its capacity past 104,000. And more than 100 names are already on the waiting list for the new suites.
