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Spending spree for college football facilities out of hand

It seems the old coach, George O’Leary, set the record straight with Georgia Tech administrators a couple seasons ago. If his teams were to play with the college football big boys, O’Leary told the powers that be, the institute had best sink some bucks into Bobby Dodd Stadium.

Spruce up the aging joint. Have the architects draw in luxury skyboxes and an exclusive seating section. Pump up capacity, even if sellouts had rarely been an issue.

So with another college season in full swing and O’Leary gone to the NFL after a quick change of clothes at Notre Dame, Tech finds itself in the midst of a nearly $80 million renovation project. Plans call for seating capacity to jump from about 41,000 to 55,000 by next season -- which is an another interesting twist since the last time Tech went down this road, in 1985, Bobby Dodd's capacity was reduced from 57,000.

What we have here is another victim of the “arms race’’ that dominates big-time football and, to a lesser extent, college basketball. By some accounts, the current building boom in college sports facilities will cost well over $4 billion. Why the huge expenditures? The cry of most coaches is that it’s needed, well, by golly, to impress teenage recruits.

Like, what stud QB is signing with an academic place that can’t afford luxury boxes? If the $100 handshake is passe, then you impress with plush field houses and dining rooms. You spend on Jock Palaces.

Just get in the arms race, baby.

“Well, I think it is big for everybody,’’ acknowledges Sterling Brown, Georgia Tech’s senior athletic director for facility operations. “It is a shame we have it. And that was a concern of George O’Leary, because you had Virginia and North Carolina doing something. I think there were like five stadiums in our conference alone that had additions put on.’’

Just once, wouldn’t you like to hear about a department head getting his or her way because somebody up the road landed a new physics building? Or an expanded research library?

Instead, you can count Georgia Tech among the Atlantic Coast Conference schools having spent a reported $520 million on football facilities alone in the last five years. Two-time national champ Florida State, not surprisingly, leads all with a $110 million stadium renovation tab.

And this craze isn’t just an ACC thing. Florida is in the middle of adding suits/club seats to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, while lowly Rutgers is sinking $10 million into its weight room and football offices and Colorado has launched a $37 million spruce-up

The Buffaloes and every member of the Big 12 Conference, in fact, have engaged in a major stadium project recently, according to a report issued last year by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a blue-ribbon panel critical of the move to commercialize college sports.

Yet despite repeated warnings from the Knight folks and a floundering economy, big-time college sports continue to run up huge debt on stadium and facilities projects. If you or I played so loosely, we’d have been in credit-card hell a long time ago.

Consider this: Over the past seven years, if the Knight figures are to be believed, capital expenditures (construction or remodeling of athletic facilities, equipment, etc.) rose a whopping 250 percent. And more than half of Division 1-A schools, at last report, had run up expenses that topped revenues by an average of $3.3 million.

Hello, anybody home? If I read this right, they’re spending more than bringing in. So schools either go deeper in debt or bank on tremendous fundraising campaigns.

“The danger is that this is sort of like the old stock market bubble,’’ warns Hodding Carter, president of the Knight Foundation. “You can keep on doing it right up to the point where you’ve reached the limits of any kind of fiscal reality and then the game begins to fall in. And for programs that don’t have major winning traditions, which try to compete in this kind of way, it just puts them way out there and all of a sudden they are not making their financial projections.’’

What it sounds like is the college sports version of WorldCom and Enron. If you look, you find academic institutions siphoning funds from general revenue to cover the athletic debt. You have, in some instances, schools making the largest capital improvement expenditures on athletic facilities -- not academic buildings.

Maybe the top two or three teams in a BCS conference can cover the athletic tab, but the fear is that a good number eventually won’t be able to. Or they’ll end up a further drain on the rest of the university.

“Some way or somehow the governing boards of these institutions have got to stop this,’’ says Knight Commission co-chair William Friday of the athletic facilities spending spree. “When you see endowments for faculty salaries way down, and you look around at how much money is needed to keep up in the sophisticated biotech world that we are all living in -- this is where you begin to see the erosion that is taking place.

“And uniformly, these institutions are raising tuition on in-state students. Students now have to pay increasingly more than they historically have to compensate for the cuts the legislatures are making. You poke around in state budgets and you’ll find subsidies all over the place for college athletics. What we’re doing is getting to the posture of where the ability of a child to pay is the dominant criteria for admission to the public university, not his or her preparation academically. This is where it gets to be very dangerous.’’

Sure does.

Mike Fish is a senior writer for CNNSI.com.

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