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Predictions for RMS

"If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, what a Merry Christmas we would all have.":rofl:

Sorry I'm behind the times here, but I couldn't let this one go without a comment.
We already did compile the $530 million in academic funding.

Derp
 
Guys - you think they would have gone all the way down this path without having the financing figured out? They wouldn't have put up with the huge public and institutional backlash if they didn't have the financing. They will get some major donations, and then finance the rest against future revenue. The last part is where the risk lies.
 
From what Ive read, possible funding sources are as follows:

1. Private donations ( Pat Stryker, billionaire, has funded $16MM for Hughes, will need to step up with lots more)
2. Sell naming rights
3. Sell Hughes Stadium
4. Sell luxury seats, boxes
5. Debt financed through higher student fees, increased gate from higher attendance, raise ticket prices, rents from concerts & other events

They could do it, but Stryker or others would need to come up with $50 million by my estimation. Theoretically, she has the means to get it off the ground, plus one of her henchmen sits on the stadium committee. Good luck to CSU. If they want it, more power to them.
 
We already did compile the $530 million in academic funding.

Derp

[video=youtube;dVh6_jEGP7I]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVh6_jEGP7I[/video]

Hey, your words - not mine to use all those "ifs"
 
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I think there is a different donor than Stryker that they have lined up. Also, at the meeting they said student fees would not be raised.
 
I think there is a different donor than Stryker that they have lined up. Also, at the meeting they said student fees would not be raised.

Multiple big donors is a good thing to have. Student fees may not be raised in near term, but they will be raised quietly a few years down the line.
 
From what Ive read, possible funding sources are as follows:

1. Private donations ( Pat Stryker, billionaire, has funded $16MM for Hughes, will need to step up with lots more)
2. Sell naming rights
3. Sell Hughes Stadium
4. Sell luxury seats, boxes
5. Debt financed through higher student fees, increased gate from higher attendance, raise ticket prices, rents from concerts & other events

They could do it, but Stryker or others would need to come up with $50 million by my estimation. Theoretically, she has the means to get it off the ground, plus one of her henchmen sits on the stadium committee. Good luck to CSU. If they want it, more power to them.

Serious questions about an idea that I find hard to take seriously: What is the likelihood you could actually sell a crappy stadium in the middle of nowhere? Who would buy it? And for how much?

Seems a bit like expecting to buy the BMW by selling the 20-year-old Fiat that never ran in the first place.
 
Guys - you think they would have gone all the way down this path without having the financing figured out? They wouldn't have put up with the huge public and institutional backlash if they didn't have the financing. They will get some major donations, and then finance the rest against future revenue. The last part is where the risk lies.

Well I have yet to see anything tangible, and their AD has absolutely no experience as an AD so yes I think they could be this stupid. I honestly don't think they expected the kind of backlash they have received because they are always the little engine that could locally while big bad CU is the only one deserving of criticism.
 
I'd bet they will have the stadium built in just a few years. I think that the stadium is a great idea for CSU especially if they have it built with donations.

My issue is the fact they are a public institution that receives a hell of a lot more funding from the state than we do. If they **** this up we all suffer. They are out spending money like an 18 year old with their first credit card. If Sparkles fails they have to stick with him. LE will probably be a great MBB coach but they are paying him like a great basketball coach without people actually going to the games. So they might have a great basketball team and still find themselves in the red.
 
I'd bet they will have the stadium built in just a few years. I think that the stadium is a great idea for CSU especially if they have it built with donations.

My issue is the fact they are a public institution that receives a hell of a lot more funding from the state than we do. If they **** this up we all suffer. They are out spending money like an 18 year old with their first credit card. If Sparkles fails they have to stick with him. LE will probably be a great MBB coach but they are paying him like a great basketball coach without people actually going to the games. So they might have a great basketball team and still find themselves in the red.

I did grad school there, I have a lot of friends and people I work with who went there. Outside of the small, very vocal core of dedicated fans the culture to support a quality major college football program simply isn't there. I don't care what kind of stadium they build on campus, it could a miniature version of the Jerrydome it isn't going to make large numbers of people interested in CSU football. We heard all the same stuff from them when Sonny was winning, we heard it when they got the Stryker donation to upgrade Hughes and other facilities. The results have never matched the dreams or even close.

You have to look at what they have done in terms of fan interest. Even when they were nationally ranked and arguably the best team in the country outside of a major conference they barely averaged 28k a game at home, when they had a top 10 Cal team come in, when they had a Big 10 Minnesota team come in they couldn't break 30,000 in attendance. This is not Nebraska or Iowa or one of those other places where everyone grows up a fan of the local university and there is nothing else to do.

Would buiding a new stadium increase attendance? In at least the short term some. The novelty of seeing the new stadium would bring some people in, the publicity of the new stadium might jog the attention of a few marginal fans who decide to come out an see a few games. This is not going to result in a 70% increase and outside the first year the 22% increase is probably overly optimistic. If we give them a benifit of a doubt and call it 25% that means an additional 5,500 per game putting it close to again that magical cap of 28,000 that keeps coming up.

One of the arguments we keep hearing for the on-campus stadium is that it will increase student attendance which it no doubt will. The problem is that while students do a lot for the game atmosphere they do very little for the bottom line. Students aren't paying the ticket prices that provide you with appreciable revenues. Also rearing it's ugly head is the parking situation. As tight as the parking situation is on the Boulder campus CSU's may be worse. One of the big arguments against Hughes was access to the stadium but parking was never a problem. Based on the time I spent in school there I wonder how they are planning to park this big increase in fans they expect. I suspect that after a few tries a significant number of their fans will say screw it and stop coming. The hassle isn't worth it to see bad football.


I do think that an on-campus stadium could be an asset to them but with an entirely different approach. Build a very nice 18-20k stadium and go to FCS level football where they could be highly competitive and give the fans a long term reason to come and watch. Even with a 42k seat stadium they aren't going to get invited to join a major conference with significant media revenue streams. More importantly they aren't going to be competitive on the field, they can't afford to support a program that will be competitive and continued losing will result in fan apathy and declining attendance. Put the program on a level where they can generate interest by providing a fun, winning environment. Forget "Be Bold" instead be creative and realistic and excell at what you can instead of failing repeatedly at what you can't do and never will be able to do.
 
Good post, Mtn.

One thing I don't understand in the midst of these monumental spending increases by CSU is what the goals and objectives of this may be.

The spending, even if it's a serious commitment to long-term debt and the revenues don't increase to the degree the analysts provided in the feasibility presentation, may make sense if it achieves the goals and objectives.

But what are they and can they be achieved without spending somewhere between $200-$450 million for this stadium?
 
MTN- I'm looking at it from a slightly different way. Most of my grade school baseball fan friends are followers of 3 teams. The Rockies (duh), the Braves and the Cubs. Before the Rockies the only baseball they could watch was the braves and the cubs. At least on a regular basis.

CSU needs this stadium to covert those students now to be fans/donors 10-15 years in the future. This is a long term project.

Your last paragraph is what gasm isn't getting. If conference expansion happens and they do not get invited they are screwed. There is a great chance of that happening and then they are screwed. It's like gambling the equity of your house on roulette. Not red or black but an individual number. If you win, wow holy **** your house is now paid off and you retire happy. But they is a bigger chance that it fails and now you have no house.

This intrigues me because I love football and I love Colorado. I hate CSU fans but I don't hate CSU. I want them to be successful at the Div1/BCS level. They are not going to get there without doing the things they are doing. But they probably won't get there doing them either.

I'm sure it is an exciting time to be a ram fan but if I was in their shoes I'd scared ********.


Edit- I didn't sleep very well the last few days so if I make no sense then......well I never make sense so business as usual.
 
MTN- I'm looking at it from a slightly different way. Most of my grade school baseball fan friends are followers of 3 teams. The Rockies (duh), the Braves and the Cubs. Before the Rockies the only baseball they could watch was the braves and the cubs. At least on a regular basis.

CSU needs this stadium to covert those students now to be fans/donors 10-15 years in the future. This is a long term project.

Your last paragraph is what gasm isn't getting. If conference expansion happens and they do not get invited they are screwed. There is a great chance of that happening and then they are screwed. It's like gambling the equity of your house on roulette. Not red or black but an individual number. If you win, wow holy **** your house is now paid off and you retire happy. But they is a bigger chance that it fails and now you have no house.

This intrigues me because I love football and I love Colorado. I hate CSU fans but I don't hate CSU. I want them to be successful at the Div1/BCS level. They are not going to get there without doing the things they are doing. But they probably won't get there doing them either.

I'm sure it is an exciting time to be a ram fan but if I was in their shoes I'd scared ********.


Edit- I didn't sleep very well the last few days so if I make no sense then......well I never make sense so business as usual.

Good post. They are doing what needs to be done to try and get an invite.

Bolded part: I can't see them being scared at all. What does that average CSU fan care? They are completely irrelevant to the college football world. If they want a seat at the table they must make a huge gamble. If they fail, they are really no worse off.
 
No worse off, except for the crushing debt. But I'm sure there is a magical formula for that too.
 
No worse off, except for the crushing debt. But I'm sure there is a magical formula for that too.

I don't think the average fan cares about the debt situation. All they care about is the potential for invite. It's a big gamble to the university, but not to the fan.
 
I don't think the average fan cares about the debt situation. All they care about is the potential for invite. It's a big gamble to the university, but not to the fan.

You are correct, but it will handcuff their AD and that will affect the product on the field and fan perks, ie: sending students to the tourney games like CU...
 
You are correct, but it will handcuff their AD and that will affect the product on the field and fan perks, ie: sending students to the tourney games like CU...

Also, if the cost of living stipend for scholarship athletes is approved by the NCAA, there's going to be a significant cost to the AD that the budget would need to have room for. Spurrier just came out and said he thought it should be $3500-$4000 per yer per athlete. For football alone, that's up to $340k per year. Could be over a million bucks a year for the entire AD. That's assumably a lot of money in CSU's budget, considering the OP's excitement over making more money from Nike than Russell as the logo brand for team apparel.
 
Also, if the cost of living stipend for scholarship athletes is approved by the NCAA, there's going to be a significant cost to the AD that the budget would need to have room for. Spurrier just came out and said he thought it should be $3500-$4000 per yer per athlete. For football alone, that's up to $340k per year. Could be over a million bucks a year for the entire AD. That's assumably a lot of money in CSU's budget, considering the OP's excitement over making more money from Nike than Russell as the logo brand for team apparel.

Even without the COL Stipend the cost of maintaining a competitive program will continue to rise. With the new contracts gained by the major conferences that in many cases double the amount of money coming into individual programs we know that much of that money is going to go right back into the programs in terms of facilities, academic support, recruiting budgets, technology, etc. Other programs will be faced with the choice of spending as well to compete or falling further behind. Schools like CSU in a best case scenario can't help but to continue to fall further behind. Their chances of being competitive on the field continue to drop and with that drop off come the eventual loss of interest, even from their dedicated fans.

$340k a year is the total earnings from a good OOC beatdown for CSU coming out of their budget. For a school with $20 million or more in conference revenue it is much more managable.

Eventually the losing becomes so ingrained that athletes start choosing to go to winning FCS programs over a terrible FBS program. I am sure that for all the schools who have been on the lower end of major college football it is a hard pill to swallow but times are changing and as much as they want to think and say they are a part of big-time football the choice is being taken away from them.
 
We already did compile the $530 million in academic funding.

Derp
Here's the thing. I know that $530MM is a lot of money. And it really seems pretty big time, especially up in Fort Fun. I know you'll think we're being elitist and all, but you see, we're in the middle of a capital campaign for the academic side of the university too. Only it's on a slightly different scale. You see, we've already received $1.05 Billion in donations for our little campaign, and we're not stopping until we get to $1.5 Billion.

I know it's hard to really understand the difference in scale from your vantage point. Our conference pays us 10 times as much as does yours. Ten times! You could triple your conference payout and it would still be a small fraction of ours. We know that Nike contract looks really good to you guys right now; it represents a 10% increase in your annual budget. If we told Nike to **** off tomorrow - our budget would go down by less than 3%. It would suck, and we might have to hold off on Women's Lacrosse, but truthfully the average fan wouldn't even notice.

Unlike a few people, I, and a lot of others on this board, do not wish doom upon you all. We just find it a little sad (and funny) that your beliefs are so skewed. It's as if you don't even know the scale of the problem you're facing, and really how big of gamble it is that you're taking. That, and we really wish you would recognize that donations are not the same as recurring revenue. At some point I may do the math for you, but I'll throw you a small hint: I would rather someone give me the CU AD's recurring revenue stream for the next 50 years than someone donate $350MM to me today. The former is much more valuable.
 
Gasm:

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Subject: Not a big deal IMO[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Posted by: LoFasZz on Fri Jun 8 2012 3:31:12 PM[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Message:He's guilty of being in a girls room wanting to have sex with her?

Unless it comes out he raped her then not a big deal at all
[/FONT]
 
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