*SIGH*
You're right. In the interest of having a logical and reasonable discussion on this issue, I concede the point that no one has ever built a brand-new stadium to house the CSU Rams in Fort Collins on CSU campus. Now that I've conceded that there are not any situations that have occurred in the past that exactly correlate to the situation in question, will you move past arguing that point and consider the SIMILARITIES in the three scenarios mentioned above?
I think you may find it helpful if I put in specific questions that you can answer in line:
- Oklahoma State University spent ~$200M upgrading an existing stadium with all of the luxury amenities that ICON says guarantee existing revenues going forward.
- This is a similar overall cost to what CSU's plan proposes
- The funding source is similar to what CSU proposes (mostly one single donor with other large supplementary donations)
- The renovation has correlated with an upswing that CSU projects in football (top 25 rankings since expansion milestones in 2008, top 10 rankings since 2010)
- This has resulted in an average attendance increase (fairly linear at about ~12% YOY growth) from 40,024 in 2007 to 57,229 in 2011. This supercedes a one-time 22% bump in attendance.
- This has increased revenues as a major portion of renovation has been the installation of box seats
- Differences (since you will point them out anyway): They have no revenue from naming rights. There appear to be no multi-use revenues.
- QUESTIONS: In the context of applicability to CSU, does it concern you that even with all the similarities AND large growths in attendance/revenues that OSU AD is having cash flow problems?
- If not, why not? For this question assume that the differences in naming rights and multi-use revenues between CSU and OSU are offset by the differences in television contracts.
- University of Maryland spent millions of dollars expanding their basketball and football stadiums
- Funding was from individual donors and borrowing against future revenues (similar to CSU's plan)
- Naming rights were sold to Chevy Chase Credit Union (became Capital One) in 2006. This does not include naming rights for the Comcast Center (basketball)
- There do not appear to be multi-use revenues for this stadium
- A large reason for this expansion (including box seats, part of the revenue "bump" prjected by ICON) was a projected attendance increase. Instead, overall attendance has decreased, partly due to lackluster on-field results
- QUESTIONS: Considering that the revenues from multi-use are likely offset by conference distributions, does it concern you that it has been shown that a lack of increase in attendance is possible by this situation?
- What is "plan B" if attendance stays the same or decreases, as has been shown to be a possibility in this scenario?
I won't include any questions about Cal because I believe the reporting done in that scenario was biased, but the long and the short from that scenario is that they may not have seen the "promised" donations that they were counting on, which doesn't seem to be something you consider to be a possibility.
