Seems like poor planning on their part. They wasted a large chunk of the $24.8 million upgrade to Foreman that could have been put towards the new stadium all along with a little foresight. Glad we didn’t waste any of our start-up money trying to upgrade Memorial Stadium.
http://hamptonroads.com/2007/09/odu-plans-248-million-renovation-foreman-field
clt is glad that we did things the right way.
I’ve looked to Old Dominion and their success as a start-up program, and have hoped we’d be able to emulate it. It is remarkable how fast they’ve been able to develop a competitive team and nurture a rabid fan-base.
Having said that wow…our university definitely got it right with the way our football stadium was built to be expandable. That was a very costly miscalculation on their part and it makes me feel even better about the path we’re on 
If they want to build a bigger and better stadium that is good for Conference USA. More power to them.
Can’t believe they’re willing to throw away that $25 million investment. Seems like it’d make more sense to just tear down the clam shells and build a new stadium at the current site.
I know they’re going to repurpose the facility, but still just seems like a waste.
I also think they’re foolish to only build 30,000. They have demand for more than that already. While I don’t believe in over-building, I think they should have done at least 35,000 from the start.
More power to them. I want all of our conference mates to have the best facilities possible (along with us of course) it can only help the conference.
It’s expandable to 45,000 according to article. I don’t think they want to make too big a jump in capacity from their near 20k current for fear of having too many empty seats. Make them somewhat scarce if possible seems to be better than having 5k-10k empties. Hoping that our first expansion to 25k will sell out as well as the initial seats have.
The thing with 30,000 though is that they could have simply bowled in the endzone of the existing stadium and gotten to 30,000 for a hell of a lot less and then moved forward with some brand new later if there was demand for more than 30,000.
Good point. Goes back to the first post that they should have probably built this one all along. Filled it up for 5 seasons, then start the expansion.
They were already filling up their 20,000 seat stadium and now they will be hosting better teams… better teams that will bring a lot more fans to games. They should be able to fill up the 30,000 seat stadium fairly easily. Once we get better established, start playing FBS, and increase our fan base, I can see us easily taking 4 or 5 thousand fans up there in a few years. If we can take 8,000 fans to Alabama for soccer, we can do the same for FBS football.
[quote=“49r9r, post:11, topic:28118”]They were already filling up their 20,000 seat stadium and now they will be hosting better teams… better teams that will bring a lot more fans to games. They should be able to fill up the 30,000 seat stadium fairly easily. Once we get better established, start playing FBS, and increase our fan base, I can see us easily taking 4 or 5 thousand fans up there in a few years. If we can take 8,000 fans to Alabama for soccer, we can do the same for FBS football.[/quote]I’d like to think so, but Norfolk is a pretty hefty drive away. Also not sure you can compare competing for a national championship against an in-state rival to a football game against ODU.
I honestly would be pretty unlikely to drive all the way to Norfolk every time we play there because there are several other opponents a similar drive away. Most people are only going to go to 1 or 2 away games each year, if any at all. We will be relying on our Triangle alums heavily if we want to take a good crowd to Norfolk.
The article says that they could not enclose the current endzones (or at least one of them) because it would require tearing down an historic building. It really sounds like they don’t have a lot of options with the current stadium. Let’s hope they build something nice where we can really whip their butts.
And they are making the right decision moving forward - the $24 million they used renovating the old stadium is a sunk cost, its irrelevant for the decision as to what to do in the future. That is, they should not let the fact that they spent the money prevent them from building something else if building the new stadium is financially better.
They may regret the decision to spend the $24 million a few years ago, but I kind of doubt they do. They, like us, clearly expected to have to spend a decade or so in FCS, so they renovated their old creaky stadium into something that was pretty good for FCS. They assemble a good FCS team and establish a tradition of winning, and then the world really changed. Realignment happens and they get a chance to move to FBS really early, and they now need an FBS facility. Probably they look at the $24 million as the cost of entry into FBS.
Also, I think the article says that most of their investment was actually used for the football center (end zone building) and the actual field and both of those will remain in some capacity (with some modifications). So, they aren’t really losing ALL of that investment, they will just be re-purposed.
Unlike us, ODU had no idea CUSA was going to come calling.
So this was just a proposal, did not include how much the new stadium would be or how they would fund it? However they hope to have it ready by 2017. Might want to get on those details…
[quote=“NinerWupAss, post:16, topic:28118”]So this was just a proposal, did not include how much the new stadium would be or how they would fund it? However they hope to have it ready by 2017. Might want to get on those details…[/quote]ODU has said in the past they won’t raise fees to go to FBS…will be interesting to see how they pull off funding a new stadium that will likely cost at least $60 million.
It will also very likely be an erector set style stadium like UCF, FAU, and FIU have. Norfolk is too close to the water table to build anything in the ground like we have and it costs more to build a concrete stadium above the ground.
Shame they couldn’t make the existing stadium work. I liked it.
[quote=“Niner National, post:17, topic:28118”][quote=“NinerWupAss, post:16, topic:28118”]So this was just a proposal, did not include how much the new stadium would be or how they would fund it? However they hope to have it ready by 2017. Might want to get on those details…[/quote]ODU has said in the past they won’t raise fees to go to FBS…will be interesting to see how they pull off funding a new stadium that will likely cost at least $60 million.
It will also very likely be an erector set style stadium like UCF, FAU, and FIU have. Norfolk is too close to the water table to build anything in the ground like we have and it costs more to build a concrete stadium above the ground.
Shame they couldn’t make the existing stadium work. I liked it.[/quote]
Yeah wasn’t the fee thing the hold up on the saying yes to CUSA the minute they were invited? I thought I remember that being a really big issue. If that is the case AND they just dropped 25 mil on their current facility, I wanna see how they pull this off.
Especially after they had the whole uproar of requiring all season ticket holders to make a donation.
#easonmoney