Football

[Jimmy Lemke]

Reply on Freak board:

[quote author=pantherholic board=Blow thread=5289 post=109205 time=1337917971]Actually after reading Jimmy's post it makes more sense to not only keep baseball but (finally) upgrade the facilities as well upgrade the basketball facilities too. As he stated, baseball is a key sport for the MVC so dropping a key sport for another doesn't make a great deal of sense. Also considering 1/2 of the programs in bball either don't have football programs in the MVFC or at all, this wouldn't hurt our stock if they did look to expand. If Evansville and/or Creighton do leave, we can fill their spot in baseball and basketball and the football conference is completely unaffected.[/quote]

There is a wish among the football schools to add another football school if possible, because they'd like for the MVFC to fold into the MVC. I don't know how beholden to that they are, but I'm sure that the absolute top priority is to add schools that can compete for titles and at-large berths. We qualify better than most.

[quote author=pantherholic board=Blow thread=5289 post=109205 time=1337917971]Getting a new arena for basketball would greatly help our stock as well considering that's the one sport that receives the most national attention even if their tourney championship game is no longer on Selection Sunday.[/quote]

Arch Madness is arguably the best conference tournament outside the power six. The A10 tournament is lame and the CAA Tournament is going by the wayside with defections, but Arch Madness remains - a brand in an of itself in a city where no team goes. If Milwaukee were out of it before the Butler debacle this year, I'd have been at Arch Madness myself.

[quote author=pantherholic board=Blow thread=5289 post=109205 time=1337917971]Football is nice. Football is fun. Football is also a "want" and not a "need". Not only is it not a need but its a want that'll take YEARS to even begin. I wouldn't be surprised if it took at least 10 years to start football. Ignoring the much more obviously glaring holes within the department for that amount of time (at a minimum) is the sign of horrible leadership. If we're struggling to find a suitable location for the basketball arena, how the hell is finding an even larger AND more expensive piece of land going to be easier?![/quote]

This talk of wants and needs is accurate. We need the basketball arena. We need the practice facility. We need the university as a whole to get on board with basketball. The want?

Football will take, at a minimum, three years to begin. UTSA's student fee increase, voted on by students, was in spring 2008 and they didn't play until fall 2011. Others have taken different times. ODU approved in 2006 and started in 2009. GSU had a study done in November 06, hired Dan Reeves to consult in 07, and didn't officially launch until April 08 - they began in September 2010.

Charlotte - the model that I'd prefer to follow, and one that is applicable because it has the most construction involved, had students and alumni push with the Charlotte Football Initiative in 2006, had approval in November 08 after the student-led march in September. They won't start until September 2013, nearly a full five years after the university approved football. They took so long because they are building a stadium from the ground up. GSU has the Georgia Dome, UTSA the Alamo Dome, South Alabama has Ladd-Peebles Stadium, and ODU renovated Foreman Field and built a football building in one end zone.

So say we established a "Milwaukee Football Initiative" today. Say we got students to agree to an increase in fees to pay for the beginning of the football program - ranging from $88 at UTSA to $150 at GSU - even with that, the fact that we'd have to build our stadium from the ground up and there is no existing public push right now, I'd wager that if we'd be able to knock off all the things on the checklist - build the MFI, get students involved and approving a big fee, get the university to spend tens of thousands on a feasibility study and town hall meetings, gain approval from the Board of Trustees, secure land and build a stadium - you're talking about a very optimistic start time of September 2018. Knowing where we are and who among our fan and donor base is interested, I'd say that 2020 would be a much more realistic begin date. If we get all our ducks in a row, I'd say 2024 would be an interesting starting date, considering it'd be 50 years from cutting the program.

There are differences in the needs for a basketball arena and football stadium. Obviously the land for a football stadium is larger - how much larger depends on the sizes compared, but the Kohl Center space is actually not much smaller than Camp Randall. I shouldn't say that - I should say that it's not as small as you think it'd be in comparison. The basketball arena almost always needs to be around other amenities - bars, restaurants, shopping - when you're building a basketball arena, you're building it for basketball, which is an event that takes 2 hours of a weeknight or Saturday afternoon. Football, on the other hand, is the event of the entire weekend, and it doesn't need all of the amenities around it because people spend their time tailgating. This happens even at small schools - take a drive up I-45 past Watertown Plank on a Saturday morning when Wisconsin Lutheran is playing, and at 8 am you'll see a lot of tailgaters for an 11 am game. It's embedded in our culture. Basically, football is an event, whereas basketball is a small part of an entire entertainment experience.

Basketball's costs are much higher - the initial cost of land may be down (but again, I said that the arena must be by other amenities, so it may be high still), but because you're building an indoor facility, those costs add to it. Football, because it's open air, is much cheaper per seat. Take $50 million for example. That money will build a nice 7,000-seat basketball arena - nothing to shake a stick at nationally, but it gets the job done - or it can build a nice 50,000-seat football stadium, as it was done at UCF's Brighthouse Networks Stadium.

Take, for instance, the 30,000-seat stadium built for Norfolk State University's I-AA FCS program. It cost $12.2 million in 1997, which adjusted for inflation is $17.7 million in 2012. And 30,000 seats would be more than even I'd want initially. I'd prefer something like Chattanooga's Finley Stadium, which cost $28.5 million in 1997 but would cost $41.3 million today. Finley Stadium is one of the best in FCS I-AA, would be a hell of a mid-major stadium in FBS I-A, and has hosted the FCS championship game. They even have an awesome renovated factory next door to the stadium that they converted to open-air for tailgaters:





Personally, I feel that playing football on-campus isn't 100% necessary, especially not immediately. The idea of taking the Milwaukee Mile in West Allis and repurposing it for football games kills two birds with one stone - you finally admit that the Mile will never be a money-maker in racing ever again (it won't, especially with Road America up the road an hour) and you build a home for the budding football program at Milwaukee. It gives us a bridge connecting the university to the new Innovation Park under construction, it gives UWM a very public space to market the brand, and it would cost the university nothing to "purchase," since it is owned by the State of Wisconsin. The major costs would involve ripping out the track, raising the infield and moving it towards the grandstand, pulling in the side bleachers for end zones or trashing them for new ones, and building a football locker room/training facility.

The state can move past trying to find the promoters to make it a profitable venture, or even one that can come close to breaking even. They add a bonafide sporting event to the west side of town for seven dates that will, conservatively speaking, average 15,000 or more.

It's not perfect. It's off-campus. The construction still will cost in the millions because you'll need the football building on-site as well as additional on-campus training and locker space as well as office space for the additional support staff needed. But aside from the on-site football building - which I'd wager would be smaller than the one Old Dominion built for $25 million in 2009 - you're talking about less than $10 million. It's just not the cost that people think.

As for Title IX, I've proven multiple times that eliminating baseball, adding cheaper softball (less travel) and not-cheap football would take care of all issues over scholarships. If they wanted to keep baseball, you'd be talking about adding 2-3 women's sports, depending on the ones you've brought out.

Still, as I've said before, the university isn't going to do this. In athletics, they're going to focus on the arena and other facilities issues. Football has to be the baby of students and alumni.

[Goose85]

If a football initiative had been started a few years ago, Milwaukee would be joining ODU and Charlotte in going to Conference USA.

Really too bad.

[Jimmy Lemke]

Man, wouldn't it be nice to have a bowl game to look forward to?

[lutzow10]

If its up to students and alumni how would you go about getting this to happen?

[Anonymous Panther]

Living in fantasy land and dreaming about something that WILL NOT happen in the near future is something that CANNOT benefit the Milwaukee athletic department right now. Our basketball program, probably the most popular sport on campus is a very, VERY bad team. I think the basketball team, or ANY other team that the University has needs to become at least a decent, semi-winning, making SOME sort of money, consistency before we even start contemplating football. Yes, I would love to see a Panthers football team, but it's not something that we should be investing time thinking about. We need to pour our energy into the teams we HAVE, not teams we DON'T.

[Jimmy Lemke]

You deal in so many absolutes, Brandon, that I wonder what your answer to this will be if we go on a three-game winning streak.

Georgia State's addition of football boosted its basketball program.

Football will happen here when the alumni and students mandate it. And even then you're talking about a five-year window before game #1.

[lutzow10]

I am new to the school. How do students and alumni go about mandating something like this? I am sorry for not knowing how politics at a public university work. I am just out of my league. I went to a small private D-3 school in Chicago the past two years and we also didnt have a football team so I have no idea how students would have any say in things. I mean i know that students vote for stuff but i didnt know they could propose something as big as adding a football team.

[Jimmy Lemke]

Absolutely. But what I'm talking about from students is more of a gesture than Student Association mandate.

Look to see what students did at Charlotte, Georgia State and South Alabama. Charlotte students, numbering in the thousands (about 2k), walked from the union to the gymnasium carrying a field goal post and chanting for football. When they got there, the Chancellor took the podium and talked to them about it, they aired some grievances, and he took it to the Board of Trustees. Georgia State's AD took the initiative and set up a bunch of brown bag lunches where administrators talked to students about their thoughts on football. Students in an overwhelming majority supported it, but it also let them shape the way it was going to happen by not just throwing out a student fee. The same thing happened at UTSA.

My favorite was South Alabama, where overnight hundreds of students chalked the sidewalks and walls on campus with "We want football" and then toilet-papered the entire quad. Awesome!

[lutzow10]

Thats pretty sweet. Haha. Where did they find a goal post without stealing one? Haha. Its not really something you can buy at walmart.

I would be really interested to see what kind of stusent interest there is on the matter here.

[illwauk]

What if this new AD were to have hundreds of black & gold footballs delivered to his office during his first day on the job?

Obviously that'd have to be followed up by other things, but this new AD should know right from jumpstreet what interest there is for football on our campus.