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The Stadium Upgrade Update |
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Written by Westward
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Thursday, 17 September 2009 14:46 |
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There is lots of buzz around the 9/22 date. There have been several short videos at football games touting that as a big date for an announcement. The prevailing sentiment is that this is the date that the "public" donation phase of the stadium funding will kick-off. This means that we have secured several big money donors, plans are close to locked for construction and now we need the rest of the base to provide for another cash infusion to get the actual construction started. If so, this is incredibly exciting and another huge opportunity for our alumni to step-up the way we support athletics at WSU. The two big things to pay attention to are the desired timeline to start and finish construction along with the amount we need to pull together in this phase of donation gathering. If we are below 60% of the total bill as we enter this phase....that's bad. It means that we are likely going to have to incur debt to pay for the upgrades and we'll be dependent on a notoriously stingy alumni base to get us over the hump. Incurring debt means that we'll be servicing that debt after construction which will take away from the additional revenue that would normally go to the athletic department. So, we'll feel good that we got it done but it's not clear how much additional revenue we'd pick up after paying off our debt load. If the construction timeline is over two years then we should be worried. Crossing over the two year threshold injects a bunch of ambiguity into the model. It likely means that costs will change and the funding or construction plan are still influx. Now, we should not expect a fully locked plan at this point but if we are over 60% of the donation then we should feel like this is going to happen soon. If we see that the timeline is less than two years we should feel like the project is tangible and we've got everything lined up to go as soon as we have the greenlight on funding. So, these are the two big things to look for if we are talking about stadium plans on 9/22. Regardless, if the conversation is public on 9/22 then we should be excited and looking at it as a way to bring us closer to parity with the bottom of the Pac-10. We shouldn't expect to be up with USC, Washington or UCLA but there is absolutely no reason to be so far Oregon State and Arizona in annual revenue for football. The stadium upgrade brings us closer to better athletes and annual bowl games. It must happen for us to be competitive in the future and it looks like we are getting close.
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