Phil and Penny Knight have outdone themselves.
The University of Oregon is ready to add yet another impressive athletic facility to its growing list.
A 130,000, six-story, yet-to-be-named football operations building has been approved, and construction is expected to begin in early 2011.
True, a new soccer and lacrosse facility is included with the deal, but the operations center matters slightly more because, hey, football is king.
The soccer and lacrosse facility will also host football pre-game festivities. More symbolically, the Casanova Center (107,000 square feet) will officially be dwarfed by this new building, dedicated solely to one sport.
I’m sure you’ve already read the press release by now, but let’s just go over the features of this new building one more time, shall we?
“Featured in the expansion, which will wrap around the north and west sides of the Casanova Center, will be a new 25,000-square-foot weight room perched on the edge of three practice fields — an enhanced grass football practice field, as well as the addition of two new synthetic turf practice fields — and a full-service dining facility available to all University athletes, students and staff.
“At the heart of the facility, which is cloaked in black metal and glass, is a centralized football operations center that will include nine dedicated football position meeting rooms, two team video theaters, offense and defense strategy rooms, as well as a larger conference suite for the entire coaching staff. The centralized area will be flanked by office and locker facilities for coaches, staff and student-athletes. Additional amenities will include a players’ lounge, a recruiting center to host prospective student-athletes, dedicated areas to accommodate professional scouts, a media interview room as well as an advanced video editing and distribution center.”
Uh, whoa.
That description may somehow be overshadowed by the architects’ rendering accompanying the release.
As a veteran of years of issues of Architectural Digest, I consider myself aware of the impact of glass-and-steel modern architecture to the human sensibilities.
The initial rendering floored me. There are some magnates in the world of industry that would take a smaller-scale version of that as a private residence on some forested acreage.
Once again, congratulations to the Knights and the Oregon athletic department. They have, yet again, raised the bar on what a commitment to athletic excellence can look like and feel like.
If facilities tell stories, then Oregon has once again built on the consistent themes of innovation and potential.
And yet, this one is different. This building is a game-changer.
I can only imagine the feelings of athletic directors across the country when they heard the announcement. Their hearts probably sunk. This building is truly one-of-a-kind; it cannot possibly be replicated anywhere else. Only a select few schools have the means and desire to build an operations facility on this scale.
Oregon was derided by many for its expenditures on a locker room, a training and medical center and a student-athlete tutoring center.
This facility, of course, is in part for the athletes themselves, but mostly for the coaches. And man, does Chip Kelly’s seat become more enjoyable by the day. His assistants, too — heaven forbid the school looking for its next head coach off the Oregon staff tries to play the facilities card.
We won’t know of the cost until completion — and even then, the public records department will have a decision to make on stonewalling the media — but I’ll venture to guess that this building alone comes to $150 million out of the Knights’ accounts.
The athletic facilities “arms race” is real, and as colleges and universities across the nation feel the pinch, the cost of keeping up grows more and more steep. (Oregon will likely have to pay maintenance costs on this building, like with the Jaqua Center; how high will those run?)
At some point, logic would maintain, a finite pool of resources creates a saturation limit. Athletic departments can only be so competitive, so creative and so fiscally responsible.
In its quest to become a model athletic department, Oregon has given the green light to a project that cannot be equaled through a lack of resources or imagination at a major university.
As economic forces and the drive for revenue shape the college sports landscape, the goal is to leverage this building toward its maximum economic output.
In this case, a perpetual winner and money-maker of a football program, and an athletic department that rides this wave toward continued success.
Let the litmus test begin.
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