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 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.
The Pac-? needs some of those schools to join for a different reason, as they all sponsor baseball. Colorado St, Boise St, and Utah St do not, which leaves them with 4 teams otherwise. Of lesser importance I'm sure. Boise had a team for a minute in 2020.
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…
go to the Sac State board and they think they will get 4 or 5 star players to decommit from Alabama or Texas to play for them lol. They also think that they will be second in recruiting of all FBS teams except USC lol. Cal, UCLA, and Stanford are way ahead of Sac.
Any time you can add a team to your FBS conference that has made four playoff appearances in 31 FCS seasons - with three of those being with one coach who is no longer there and the fourth being the year after he left - you just have to do it.
near end of season update: anyone think NDSU could be moving at some point soon? I know they have talked about moving up for the last 200,000 years but the Pac and MW are running out of viable expansion options. Davis seems to be getting some level of national recognition but im still on the fence about our AD even doing the stadium remodel (ill never not be annoyed by that stupid twitter post) or push for us moving. Were killing it in the FCS anyways.