Bingo!!! We have:
1. The best facilities in the B1G
2. The most loyal fan base in the B1G
5. Good NIL money. Not great, but better than half the league.
The "best facilities in the B1G" made a lot of regional contractors, architects, and law firms rich. Shocking, I know, but having 50 flat-screen iPads in a locker room doesn’t win games on Saturdays in November it just looks pretty on a recruiting brochure nobody cares about anymore.
If you flipped the priority list from:
1. Top facilities in the B1G
5. Middle-of-the-pack NIL
To:
1. Good-enough facilities
5. Top-3 NIL money in the conference
...you win double the games.
But direct player payroll doesn't build multi-million-dollar physical assets, line the pockets of commercial construction firms, or let mega-donors put their last name on a building brick. Is it really any surprise the institutional culture leans so heavily toward capital builds when we have names like Weitz sitting directly on the Board of Regents? It raises an obvious red flag about where the system's priorities have been stuck.
or law firms that profit on big construction projects, law firms like Rembolt Ludtke.
Or Sampson construction that builds a lot of the universities complexes who also builds for KAAPA ethonal holdings. Why are Rembolt, KAAPA, and Weitz important? Why do they need to make sure we keep building facilites.
it’s dirty. Very very very dirty.
It’d be a damn shame if donors stopped treating the athletic department like a real estate development project and started treating NIL like the actual roster-building tool it is. Isn't shifting that exact mindset what Troy Dannen is trying to pull off? And yes where Troy tries to raise money matters. Telling a donor we need a facility vs we need a RB is important. Sure the money for the running back won’t go to the school but it benefits his operations
Great employees make a company great. Not the building they work in. Pay talent, you get great results