yeah, that air horn has been around for a couple of years. I appreciate someone’s effort, but it’s not the same as a 100 year old vintage steam whistle that rings out for miles.

The steam engine was on display (not running) a couple years ago at a game. I would bet there are some steam experts at the CA State Railroad Museum shop who could opine on how close it is to operational state and the safety factor. If it is not reasonably operational within a week, you could probably run the whistle on compressed air at least. Interestingly, Jay Leno has a steam tractor he has modified to run on propane. He said it makes it much faster and more practical to start up and shut down than a coal or wood fire and less smoky. Maybe a good future project?

Fire and building officials have a good amount of interpretive leeway. Without seeing the life safety drawings, my numbers were speculative. In Toomey days, they would have been more concerned with fire. Nothing to burn at AS, but unfortunately nowadays they also have to think about how quickly could they clear for other kinds of incidents. But I’d love to see a SRO crowd!

I believe the home record (not counting causeways at Hughes stadium) was 12,800 at Toomey field in 1977 against Reno. I’m told it was a standing room only crowd packed to the gates. I think the record at Aggie Stadium is around 10,800.

Apparently drinking and driving is a past time there. Last time I drove, the highway into Cheney had one of those electronic “people killed on this road this year” signs. Drive careful.

I will say this, as a distant Aggie who watches everything via these streams... BSTV is a more reliable source than Pluto. That said, the overall reliability of both varies by host location. Games at Aggie Stadium drop out more often than when we are away - they need a tech geek to make sure there is not an upload bandwidth issue. I always stream the KHTK audio via the TuneIN app on my phone, but keep it muted. It is very reliable and then I can immediately unmute if the video feed drops at a pivotal moment (or if I get sick of listening to homer commentators). TuneIN runs about a play behind the video so I don't miss anything.

Which "they" do you mean? Davis, Montana, or the Zebras?

head ref needs to be fired immediately. "do your job" is exactly what Hawk said too and got a penalty on the bench.

While the Montana facility does include a football locker room, the balance of the facility is for all 15 sports they field. True, they were probably not paying the CA $50-75/hr prevailing wage to construction workers, but I will say this - politics aside, I work with both union and non-union labor and the union guys show up on time, have fewer OSHA injuries and less re-work. There's value in that.

Believe it or not, Montana built their training facility for about $275/sf, a pretty good value in construction. I watched a video tour and it is a pretty simple building in terms of construction and materials. Just lots of vinyl graphics and a little architectural lighting make it look more impressive. Actually pretty financially responsible. They were able to fund-raise the full cost of construction, which is not likely at Davis. As Zander alludes to, a common funding mechanism at public universities is to co-mingle athletics and academics in one structure - you can use state academic money to build general use offices, classrooms, and lecture halls. In this way you can help subsidize the sunk costs of site development, utilities, general conditions, etc. under academic auspices and athletic funding covers the difference for their added floors or wing at a better price-point than going it alone. It just means you have to be OK with non-athletes being around and do it strategically enough not to get the Academic Senate's panties in a wad.

My cost estimates are just a wag without really knowing site conditions or having a conceptual design so its just kind of for fun, but normally I charge people for this!

Interesting thought charging for the loo. Although I feel like its only fair to include a $1 token with every couple beers and a $2 token with every order of pulled pork nachos.

I tend to agree with you that the business case for a stadium seating expansion isn't quite there yet. But if this year isn't just an outlier it may be something to think about down the road. There are other expansion considerations too. Limited access party decks have become pretty common and several other Big Sky teams have justified a handful of skybox suites.

I would suggest $1500-$2000 per seat based on comps. For athletic training center, Sac State spent about $650/sq ft in today's dollars and Cal about $1150/sq ft.

If you have a complete design, a good scheduler, and qualified tradespeople, you can get done quickly. Many big projects start construction before design is done, leading to delays and rework.

You'd think. It's not like UCD is standing in line down at the Yolo county building department, but they are still going to follow state building code, National Electric Code, National Fire Protection Association code, plus self-imposed standards like gender neutral restrooms and breastfeeding support rooms. My guess is that the university has its own building official along with the fire marshal. They may well be tougher than Yolo county inspectors. At the end of the day the architects and engineers aren't going to want the liability of fudging things.

In my mind the first thing you have to do is define what it is that needs to be built - how many seats are in scope and are there key limiting factors, like can't build above a certain height, must provide a home for endangered woodpeckers, or whatever. The trap here is to define a budget that sounds good and then try to back into a scope that fits. Invariably, 3 things happen - 1. the project takes forever and inflation happens to your costs but your funding stays the same, 2. you find an architect/contractor who say they can make it work but when push comes to shove it turns out they assumed you wanted inferior materials and that they could get every subcontract negotiated below market rate, 3. people lie about what is realistic - contractors who want the job, and PR people who don't want to walk back public promises.

So how many seats do we need to fill current or projected demand? This needs to be a real number, not a build-it and maybe they come number. Every dollar you spend on seats that never fill could be going to a scholarship endowment. In fact you probably have to emotionally acknowledge that the whole endeavor makes no financial sense. Half the football season is before school starts. Not going to fill the stadium. So we are building this for 3 or 4 days out of the year. To fill the stadium we are discounting tickets to $15 or $20. There is no business case to invest thousands per seat in capital plus annual maintenance for annual revenue of less than $100 per seat. Now, there are impossible-to-quantify things like more people at a fun game = more donors someday. Don't let the bean counters try to smoke and mirror a performa to rely on this. Acknowledge we are building a strategic value money pit because we love Aggie Football and be emotionally OK with this.

So, for example sake, we decide we need 2300 seats. Doesn't matter where they go or what they look like, bottom dollar is we need 26 more toilets and 39 more linear feet of exits. More concessions and ticket booths? Food trucks pads and mobile ticketing are probably a better investments. These are the non-sexy items that executives hate to fund. But it is critical to do the homework here because you might find something unexpected, like if for example, the sewer force main in LaRue Rd can't handle one more toilet without upgrading the lift station at great expense. Then you have to decide if the project will be burdened with that critical infrastructure or if there are other funds for that. Now you can come up with a seating concept with the features you want. At this point you can start to come up with a real cost. It of course costs money to do all this homework and you're not even sure if you're doing the project yet or what it costs. Executives hate spending money to realize something is a bad idea, but you can't look at this wasted money. It would not be a terrible idea to invest in this homework now and develop a strategy with meaningful estimates and timeline.

It is hard to know when the market is in a peak or valley when you are in it, but ideally, you fundraise when the market is good, go to design and construction in a low so that you can open when the market is rebounding. Your advantage for building when the market is cooler with either donated or bond money is that contractors are hungry because corporate capital projects dry up to prop up quarterly stock prices. But if you have the money and need the seats now, don't wait for a recession because inflation may bite you in the meantime.

So I have spent the past few years project managing stadium/arena construction and renovation for a multi-facility owner. (Anyone in Athletics feel free to PM me if you wish). I did a brief count, and there are about 8800 fixed seats, which means they figure about 1000 per endzone. Measuring, they are allocating about 15sqft per person on the grass, which is typical for a "non concentrated occupancy". I don't know Davis code, but nationally, you provide 0.2" of exit width per occupant. I count 18 pedestrian gates, call em 10' wide and we're right on the money.

To expand Aggie Stadium, the seats are the cheap part. The money gets tied up in supporting infrastructure IF that is not already in place, as well as administrative construction soft costs. For example, in my jurisdiction, I have to keep a ratio of 1 toilet per 90 seats which is supposed to ensure a wait time of less than 3 minutes. Let's just say that's what the building department at UCD uses, that would mean AS has about 120 toilets. Even simple restrooms are more expensive than you think. Now, hopefully the planners recognized this as a possibility and upsized the utility loops in the stadium. Costs very little at initial construction but gets very expensive to redo later.

Now, what expansion would make the most sense? Until we routinely break 10,000, the only thing that makes sense is to negotiate a standing room oversell with the fire marshal and bring in portolets if the math requires. For a permanent structure I would say a second deck on the Aggie Pack side if you could commit to mostly 7pm games. Cantilevered over the AP would be expensive, but a steel superstructure over the walkway and restroom buildings with aluminum bleachers would be economical. In fact you can see the gaps in the restroom buildings are spaced right for stairways going up. Lets say you did 20yd to 20yd, so 5 sections or roughly 2300 seats if its the same size sections as existing. You'd probably get the same net gain filling in the end zones, but in the process take away a popular family hillside and replace it with poor sightline seats that aren't going to command much premium - unless you move the AP to north end zone like Toomey. That was a lot of fun down there. But back to brass tacks, all that concrete is going to cost you more than a steel structure. That kind of poured in place concrete is a lot of material and labor intensive... gotta get it graded, stabilized, concrete trucks there, formed up, finishers working and everything measured right in the field. Off by an inch? Get the jackhammers. With an engineered steel structure it all comes precut from the factory with less opportunity for expensive field screw ups.

As to the comment about the cost of steel, that's probably not what broke the budget on Aggie Stadium. In real life, they built it at a construction peak - shortage of workers and supplies in a boom drives general contractor prices, kind of like right now. If they had waited to build it in the recession, you would have found bricklayers and plumbers working at a discount. Also oil prices were spiking, which had to have influenced the cost of the massive earthmoving effort to dig that bowl and then truck in all that concrete. Throw in a wet winter and the GC was able to justify his underbid - note that up to that point the contractor had mainly only built apartment buildings. Looking at comparables, you probably could have done a 20,000 seat (plain but functional) surface stadium with a qualified contractor for the price we paid.

Ok, end of the novel. I could talk at length on this, so let me know if you want more.

Meanwhile Davis police are riding around on toy scooters giving out tickets for insufficient bicycle reflectors. Priorities.

At the time this was announced we reached out to the Athletics department and requested to purchase a piece of bleacher as a souvenir. Response started as "huh, why?" then to "hmm maybe we can work something out, we'll be in touch", to "lead, asbestos, red tape". Being in construction industry myself, lead paint on the superstructure was plausible. Very little chance of the aluminum bleachers being hot. More likely scenario was they already had a demo contract in place and the bid was based on the contractor ripping it down (not gently) and getting the metal recycling proceeds. If I had been in town, I would have tried to work something out with the demo guy. A cold 24-pack gets you just about anything in construction.

I recall several similar sprees when I lived there years ago. I don't know that they target Asians so much as anybody who just might not be paying attention to their surroundings at that moment. Beginning of the school year is easy pickings I'm sure. When caught it usually turned out to be someone from West Sac or East Bay, and always a dark hoodie. Good reminder that bad things can happen anywhere day or night.

No doubt. Leading up to a game every restaurant server and grocery store clerk is wearing Montana gear and pretty much everything came to a standstill on game day. Lot of good smelling food going on at the pregame, so yeah, it probably is the envy of college football in terms of the city supporting the team. Kind of reminds me of a smaller version of Gainesville, FL. Keep in mind that Missoula is about the size of Davis, but happens to be the second largest city in the state with many miles of nothing between it any literally anything.

I've been using the Pluto app on Fire Stick. I use the TuneIn app on my phone to get the 1140 audio feed and mute the TV if the announcers suck like they did this week.

In my era the Band-uh mustered about 50 to every away football game (every away basketball game too at one point), typically drove ourselves and slept on whatever gym floor we could for free. Last few years travel has been limited to CP, Suck State, and Anaheim, but they have a new band director so maybe some new hope.

My experience going to EWU and Montana some years ago was that EWU was more pleasant to visit, kind of same vibe as our home games. Montana has a more intense gameday experience for sure, though I was unimpressed with the quality of their fans. I remember getting spit at - and it wasn't drunk frat boys. It was sober middle age guys in dad jeans and New Balances doing it with their 9 year old sons. At that time, very few Aggie fans went to either except a few players parents.