Against the ever-changing backdrop of college athletics, administrators like Texas A&M athletics director Trev Alberts have had to grapple with the shifting reality when it comes to their program’s finances.
A recent $2.8 billion settlement from the NCAA means schools need to start budgeting for a new reality. Some schools have already taken aggressive measures, with Texas A&M cutting some of its administrative staff to make ends meet.
What does that mean for facilities projects going forward?
“I think it’ll all be part of it. I do think that there’s two ways to look at it,” Trev Alberts said at the SEC spring meetings last week. “You can say, ‘Well, gosh, maybe we shouldn’t do facility enhancement, we’re going to need those dollars.’ But if those are facility enhancements that generate addition revenue to you to fill a gap that you need, well that’s a different piece. So I think there’s two different components to that.”
If anyone can make it work with facilities, it’s probably Alberts. He was the one who spear-headed a $450 million stadium renovation effort at Nebraska before moving to Texas A&M.
Still, he admits there will be some form of balance in there.
The days of constructing new fancy locker rooms with waterfalls and golden toilets might be over.
“Things that don’t generate revenue for you, does it look different?” Trev Alberts said. “Probably. I was always struck by back when I was at Nebraska in the Big Ten and we’d go to Indianapolis for our football media days and I’d go into the locker room — and of course it was a much better locker room than I had when I played for the Colts — but it was practical. It was a rectangle with lockers. Not nearly as nice as we have in the college space. So could some of those types of things change? Certainly.”
The bottom line is that administrators are thinking about things far differently than they might have five to 10 years ago.
It’s not necessarily that there won’t be facilities upgrades any more, they just might happen in areas that are a little more beneficial to the bottom line.
“I think things become more practical,” Trev Alberts said. “I think all capital projects from now, at least from my perspective, need to be focused on how do we generate more revenue, self-generated revenue, points of sales, all those types of things. Selfishly, from my perspective at Texas A&M, fortunately for us we’ve already done that. Ten years ago. That’s why A&M’s in a pretty good position.”
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