A blonde receptionist sits behind a desk under a sprawling wall of televisions in the lobby of the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex.
A student-athlete makes his way from a faraway corner. He runs up to ask for help using the elevator to access another section of the byzantine sports facility. Meanwhile, 55-inch television screens beam overhead, 64 in all. They glow from the far wall of the cavernous lobby at all hours. Long after the coaches, players and janitors have gone home, the screens display either “SportsCenter” or various graphics with only the occasional car driving along Martin Luther King Boulevard to notice. The video wall has to stay on, says the facility manager, because shutting it off might reset the finely tuned color settings.
“Football is a seven-days-a-week operation. And even in the off-season, you think about recruits [visiting], there’s still training going on, coaches are here,” said Calvin Kenney, Hatfield-Dowlin’s on-site manager. “The building never goes to sleep.”
High-end projects require high-end maintenance. With football season over, the building donated by Nike co-founder and UO alum Phil Knight runs at a higher clip than most buildings on campus. Records provided to the Emerald show that from July 1, 2013 to Dec. 31, the building has racked up $95,413 in utility expenses alone — averaging just under $16,000 per month — and the building didn’t open officially until Aug. 3. For its first six months, the total bill for the building is $235,284, on pace to cost nearly half a million a year. So far, the building is paid off by both the athletic department funds and an endowment set up by donors.
Before the University of Oregon even cut the ribbon on its brand new football operations building, the project garnered attention from all across the nation. Its interior trimmings, included hand-woven rugs from Nepal and hardwood from Brazil, drew The New York Times and Sports Illustrated to Eugene. It was called “opulent” and even an intergalactic space station by Deadspin, a comparison that isn’t far-flung from the arms race that’s overtaken college athletic programs.
State of the art facilities is the oldest trick in the recruiting book, and Oregon caught up in a matter of years.
Like many expensive gifts, these buildings come with responsibilities and those have grown substantially over the last four years. The university pays a third of the costs of the John E. Jaqua Center’s operating costs for access to the first floor of the three-story glass cube. It also came with stipulations from Phil Knight to bolster the academic help for athletes. A 2011 story by Register-Guard reporter Greg Bolt reported the cost took nearly $2 million out of the academic budget. Similarly, Matt Knight Arena was funded up to $100 million by Knight, and took an extra $29 million from donors. Still, the arena required yet another $98 million the university had to find for itself.
For comparison, the Erb Memorial Union, 60 percent larger and overrun with students, was billed $481,225.99 from July 2012 to June 2013. Its costs don’t account for many of the bells and whistles of the football facility. The 137,000-square-foot Hatfield-Dowlin Complex — which plans to bring in other student-athletes to use its cafeteria — is mainly exclusive to the football program and costs roughly $2,500 per player for just half a year of operation.
Kenney says the cost of running the building could be misleading. The International Facility Management Association, the organization that sets the building’s standards, suggests giving a building three years before concluding how it costs to run a building like Hatfield-Dowlin.
“We really won’t have an idea until after the first three years,” said Kenney, who worked as a facility manager for the city of Eugene before accepting his current job. “If you look at the first six months, we opened the building in August when we had record heat, we had a monsoon — literally a monsoon — hit the area, then we had record snow and record cold, already in six months.”
The building itself is an investment in keeping the football program in the limelight, fixed in the minds of both recruits and potential students.
As athletic departments are often referred to as “the front porch” of a university, UO’s is now towering and granite. For opponents, the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex also holds an air of intimidation. It’s a fortress sealed in triple-pane windows. It shows the flex of an athletic department unabashedly pursuing every edge over the competition. For recruits, it’s a show of loyalty and the benefits afforded to them at Oregon versus any other place in the country — that it may write the check for a billboard in Time Square as it did for Joey Harrington in 2001.
“We always had in mind the arrival sequence of the visiting team. As the visiting team arrived from Martin Luther King Boulevard in their bus, their first view of this building should be ‘Oh my god, we have to play against them?’” said Bob Synder, the project manager for the building’s architects, ZGF Architects. “That was intentional. It’s sort of armor, a dark imposing building that tells them about their competition.”
For the time being, the building’s operating costs derive from athletic department coffers and various donations.
“The Hatfield-Dowlin complex is an athletic building and is funded entirely by athletic department funds,” said Craig Pintens, senior associate athletic director of communications. “A quasi-endowment fund for the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex was established with the University of Oregon Foundation during construction of the building to assist in operational costs.”
Part of that endowment comes in the form of naming rights to certain sections of the building, similar to a hospital wing. For example, the coaching room for running backs is named for former Duck Jonathan Stewart.
The bill, however, may be a small price to pay for a competitive edge over other booming athletic departments across the country. The financial tidal wave making its way across the country has landed other schools their own dedicated football performance centers. Arkansas recently revealed a $35 million complex itself. Washington State also unveiled plans for a $61 million, 79,000 square foot football building. Even Louisville, lauded far more for its basketball program than football, dropped $7.5 million on a football complex.
In the off-season, the building still works as office space for the football program. For coaches and other essential operations staff, there is no off-season. During last Wednesday’s national signing day, they sat in the building’s War Room perusing info on their new recruits. Meanwhile, the televisions beamed in the lobby, morphing into four simultaneous streams of recruiting coverage with the building and all its occupants humming along.
Update: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the building’s operating costs were paid entirely by the endowment fund. The athletic department also uses its own general fund in these payments.