Five months ago, Lincoln voters approved a $344 million bond that kick-started a three-year plan to build a downtown arena. On Friday, Nebraska’s Athletic Department declared it’s far from finished with upgrading its facilities.
NU Athletic Director Tom Osborne announced plans to add 5,000 more seats to Memorial Stadium, an ambitious project that would cost $55.5 million and, more importantly, help Nebraska compete with its new big-budget, big-stadium foes in the Big Ten Conference.
Osborne also unveiled a $4.75 million project that would give Nebraska’s baseball and softball teams a new practice facility, and he admitted a $20 million project to renovate the Bob Devaney Sports Center and make it the new home of Husker volleyball is in the works.
The University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents will be asked to approve those first two projects during their meeting on Friday in Omaha. Osborne said the board likely would receive a formal proposal on the Devaney plan in December.
The Memorial Stadium project would be built behind and over the East Stadium balcony and would be completed for the 2013 season. The baseball facility would be located at Haymarket Park and would include batting cages, pitching mounds and a full-turf infield for practice.
Osborne is well aware of how the $80.25 million in proposed spending on facility upgrades might come off to some. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln must make serious budget cuts for the eighth time in 11 years, and the state’s legislature is facing a revenue shortfall of more than $600 million.
“I can see people saying, ‘How can you do this?'” Osborne said. “The reason we’re doing it is we think, as we move into the Big Ten, we need to be competitive.”
Nebraska’s athletic department won’t use any state dollars or student fees to fund the projects, and Osborne said it has built up a reserve of funding in recent years that will allow NU to pay “for at least half of all of these projects” with money it has saved up.
More than $40 million of the money for the Memorial Stadium work will come from private donations, and the remaining $15 million will come from bond revenues. All of the funding for the proposed 22,000-square-foot indoor baseball facility would come from the athletic department.
That the project won’t use state money is a key reason why Regent Tim Clare said he’ll defend the proposal at Friday’s meeting.
“I was skeptical as to the timing,” Clare said. “But at the end of the day, after considering all the benfits of what it would do and considering what the athletic department gives back to the university itself, I think it’s something that’s very worthwhile.”
Memorial Stadium’s official capacity is 81,067, but its average attendance this year through three games is 85,620.
That 5.6 percent average overcapacity this season is second-best in the nation among big-stadium schools behind defending national champion Alabama.
The proposed Memorial Stadium expansion plan calls for between 2,000 and 2,500 new club seats, 30 skyboxes and up to 2,800 general seats, all located on the eastern portion of the stadium. The stadium was last expanded in 2006, a renovation that focused primarily on the North Stadium.
As much as the program would profit off more seating, such an expansion would also give more Husker fans a chance at landing the season tickets they’ve long coveted.
“We’ve had waiting lists of about 3,000 people who want season tickets if they ever became available,” Paul Meyers, NU associated athletic director for development, said in June.
But there is some risk in building onto a stadium that was already revamped only five years ago.
The biggest concern with expanding is the risk of ending Nebraska’s record-setting sellout streak.
Since 1962 and through 307 games so far, every seat in the stadium has been sold.
“It doesn’t make much difference if you have 110,000 seats if 20,000 of them are empty,” Osborne said.
Reaching the 90,000-person plateau would put NU in the top 10 nationally in home attendance, but Big Ten schools Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State each have stadiums that hold more than 100,000 fans. In fact, Michigan just completed a $226 million project that increased its stadium capacity to an NCAA-best 109,901.
And those three powerhouses have far more than that – they each also tout annual athletic department budgets of more than $100 million.
Nebraska’s is approximately $75 million this year, and Osborne said the $7 million in new annual revenue that the East Stadium seats would offer can help close that gap.
“I really don’t particularly subscribe to the theory that you’ve got to keep up with the Joneses all the time,” Osborne said, “but you better at least be in their league.”
“As we start competing with some of those schools in the Big Ten, (the new revenue) won’t necessarily get us all the way there, but it’ll certainly move us in that direction.”