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!

I was comparing to where we are now not at the next level.

I want to see us move up and with that better facilities. But at our current level, it could be a whole lot worse.

Recreation Hall opened in 1977, almost 50 years ago. It must have been a pretty ambitious facility for the time.

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.

I like being West Coast and playing peer institutions.

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.

(And the College of Idaho Yotes are NAIA.)

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(+/-).

Most D2 programs have what, 10 - 14 ICA teams? We have 24. We outgrew them in size, resources, and attractiveness.

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.

We, also, have been appropriately thanked four our donations to UC Davis.

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.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that they have lost 27 of their last 34 games over 2+ seasons.

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.

Here’s an article with some recent examples:

http://www.arenafanatic.com/ncaa.html

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.

i thought i had read somewhere that seats in the berm would actually decrease capacity.

Keep the grass berms!

you can fit more butts per square foot on bleachers than grass. I think they assume each grass end zone holds about 1000. Each bleacher section has an average of 400-450 seats. You could fit maybe 5 sections each end? So net gain of a couple thousand? Given how popular the grass berms are and that they wouldn’t be great seats, I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze. Unless maybe there was a desire to move the students to an end zone. The north end zone at the Toom I think had a bigger impact on the game than students at the 50. I wonder if there is a market for on-field cabanas. I have seen some schools starting to bring premium seating onto the field to fill in dead space around end zones to bring the crowd noise closer.

Agreed on all points, just trying to maximize seats while minimizing cost. I don’t have a problem moving the students to the end zone especially with my time at Toomey but I imagine there would be some uproar about what was communicated/promised back ahead of construction.

I like the grass. I think it adds character. Without it our stadium wouldn’t feel unique at all.

I did a little googling to find what the top NILs were. These are estimates, but a see similar numbers from various articles. Top schools like Texas paid out something like $20M, do the Sac12 would be able to jump to big boy table!

Of course, no one knows what NIL collectives will look like when the revenue sharing kicks in. Power 5 conferences can pay up to $22M - presumably most of that domes from donors redirecting their NIL ‘pledges’. Group of 5 limit is much lower.

Scroll to the 3 minute mark to hear their opinion about the push for Sac to be in the PAC12:

I’ll be mad is sac goes and we don’t….

There is no reason they have an advantage over us. If they make this happen it’s because they took a chance that we weren’t willing to take. I don’t think financially they are in a better spot than us. Same region. Currently worse facilities…