I think Sacramento has struggled to be taken seriously as a big city. While I do not wish them ill, lining up behind Sac State as an ego savior is sort of like sending Peter Griffen to be your product spokesperson on Shark Tank.
The stands filled in pretty good after a few minutes into the first quarter. Sometimes it doesn't look like the crowd is very big but, when you walk around, there are a lot of people at the concessions and walking around the stadium. We should have a huge crowd for the Montana State game.
I’m the first to say that we need to focus more on athletics to be taken seriously and have dreams to play in the real D1… I have to say that our stadium and basketball arena are pretty nice. So many other teams faculties feel like a high school where ours feels like many notches above. We have a full circular football stadium and the grass really adds a nice touch.
if we joined the current Pac12 we’d have the worst basketball arena in the conference. It’s in the upper half of the Big West, but seriously lacking compared to most MWC schools. Be nice to have more than 1 snack stand and hand rails in the upper section!
Given how I hate what has happened at the major college level (NIL, all these super conferences, schools seeing 50%+ turnover due to the transfer portal) I am totally content with the Ags staying where they are. In fact, I was not all that happy when they moved up from Division 2. Sounds liek I'm in the minority here.
we really had no choice. The NCAA declared if you were playing D1 in other sports, you were playing D1 in football. The idea of playing Cal State East Bay or Sonoma in basketball, and playing…….college of idaho(?) in football is not very appealing!
When people ask me why Davis left D-2 I always answer that D2 left UCD. The list of D-2 schools west of the Rockies that dropped football, or moved to then D-1AA, or to D-3, or moved and then dropped football altogether is long.....St. Mary's, Santa Clara, Chico State, San Francisco State, Sonoma State, Humboldt State, CSU-Hayward/East Bay, Cal Lutheran, Azusa-Pacific, CSU-Northridge, Western Washington, Portland State, Sac State....and throw in D-1 schools that dropped football, Pacific, Long Beach....
There are no longer any D-2 football programs in California. I believe the only two on the Pacific Coast are Central Washington and Western Oregon and they play in the Texas centered Lone Star Conference.
Yes, thanks, I get all of that and I'm not longer unhappy about the move to D1 since it let me see the Aggies play in Hawai`i (for two more years at least). Being satisfied with where we are, though is a long way from wanting to see UC Davis move to the Pac-12(+/-).
As I recall from the bigs interview, a lot of football programs in California were dropped when title IX kicked in. Football was just too expensive to keep in lieu of those requirements.
The average Davis student and resident could not tell you the difference between UNC and future Pac 12 member CSU. In fact Nevada, a program with a 30,000 seat stadium, real donors and some history at the D1 level, drew 16k for Colorado State last night.
Did the Sac12 put out any numbers for what a new stadium and arena would cost? I’ve been googling for costs of new stadium/arenas and it seems like $300M for a stadium (San Diego St was something like $350M for 35k stadium) and $50M for an arena wouldn’t be crazy numbers. Edwards Center is a $60M project.
If built today, what’s your guess on how much it would cost to build the existing UC Davis Health Stadium from start to finish, as you saw it Saturday?
$50m would be a pretty basic arena. $300m probably high for a stadium this size. In the case of SDSU, $90m was land acquisition to develop a parcel off campus. Sac already owns the land and could probably reuse some infrastructure - parking, Broad Center, maybe even the field itself. I’d suggest $100m arena and $100-200m stadium depending on what one means by state of the art. Typical 25,000 seat MLS stadiums are going around $200m.
according to Wikipedia (source of all knowledge) it cost $30M way back when which is $41M in today money. Not sure what LIGHTS (that was phase 1.1), and the additional 10-20k seating would add to today’s cost.
What number could capacity get to by just filling in the berms (and then I imagine the fire marshal’s “official” capacity would be slightly more)? Knock out the easy and relatively inexpensive adds first.