The 'arms race' continues; FSU considers building new football facility
Less than two months after saying he would hold university officials to their word that they would invest the necessary resources to keep Florida State among the nation’s elite football powers, Jimbo Fisher’s vision for the program appears to be coming into focus.
Fisher, who reportedly turned down an offer from LSU at the end of the 2016 season and agreed to a new eight-year contract with FSU, has a number of items he would like to see addressed. At the top of the list appears to be a new standalone Football Operations Center, similar to the one completed last month at Clemson.
The proposed project, which is still in the conceptual phase, was confirmed to Warchant.com this week in interviews with university president John Thrasher and athletics director Stan Wilcox.
“You’ll never accuse Jimbo of not asking,” Thrasher said with a laugh. “He wants an elite program. And he’s got an elite program, but it takes resources. You hear about everybody being in an arms race, and to some extent, that’s true.”
With that in mind, Thrasher has asked Wilcox to meet with representatives from Seminole Boosters Inc., which is the athletics department’s fundraising arm, and football staffers to discuss the proposed football building and the “prioritization” of other facilities for the next five to 10 years.
Once that takes shape, Thrasher said, decisions will be made about which projects can be completed when, taking various factors into consideration, such as rising coaches’ salaries, existing debts and the potential increased revenue from a planned ACC cable channel.
“We’ve got to come up with the priorities, and then we’ve got to come up with a funding plan for all of that,” Thrasher said.
Wilcox told Warchant he is aiming to have a plan in place within the next six to eight weeks so that Fisher and FSU's fundraisers can pitch the concept to donors on Fisher's spring booster tour.
Currently, Florida State’s football program is housed in the multi-purpose Moore Athletics Center. In that building, which sits in the north end zone of Doak Campbell Stadium, the football team shares various facilities with more than a dozen other Seminole programs -- they juggle everything from the weight room and athletic training rooms to the academic support offices and dining hall, as well as other meeting rooms.
Because the football program is so much larger than the other sports teams, with more than 100 student-athletes and dozens of staffers, FSU’s administrators understand why Fisher covets more space.
“As you look around the country, you see more and more football programs building and having separate football facilities -- operations facilities for football,” Wilcox said. “It makes it very convenient, particularly when you’re dealing with the number of student-athletes that football deals with on a day-to-day basis.”
Wilcox, who previously served as a senior administrator at Notre Dame and Duke, pointed out that both of those universities have had football-exclusive facilities for years.
Beyond the practical and functional reasons for such a building, FSU officials know it also would be helpful in recruiting -- especially with ACC Atlantic Division rival Clemson opening its new football facility in late January. The Tigers’ operations center, which came with a $55 million price tag, is housed in a building of more than 140,000 square feet.
Whether FSU could tackle something that ambitious is to be determined. One of the great challenges facing the Seminoles, beyond the cost, is identifying the space to add another large building in the already crowded athletics complex.
“We don’t have an unlimited amount of land that we can work with when building our facilities,” Wilcox said. “So we have to get creative and really think about how we might be able to create what we have in the space that we currently have.”
“One side would say let’s build a whole brand-new football operations facility,” Thrasher said. “Then there’s the other side that would say maybe we could use the Moore Center and maybe add on to it in certain ways that would maybe free up space and really advantage both our football operations as well as our so-called Olympic sports. So we’re looking at all of that.”
The timing of the project might seem a little odd considering FSU made major renovations to its football coaches’ offices and other areas in the Moore Center less than three years ago.
But Wilcox said that can’t be seen as a reason to not move forward with additional projects. In his nearly 30 years of experience in college athletics administration, he said, one thing has remained constant -- the push for improved facilities.
“How do we make sure that we stay within the curve or ahead of the curve,” Wilcox said. “You’re always going to be in the facilities business. Since I’ve been in college athletics, you never have that comfort of saying, ‘We’re done.’”
And if a new standalone facility for football is constructed, it's not as if the vacated space in the Moore Center would be wasted.
“It becomes available space for many of our programs that are in dire need of additional space,” Wilcox said. “It starts alleviating some of those tensions with scheduling for all your other sports.”
Fisher did not go public with his request for an operations center at the time, but he spoke at length in December about the need for additional resources to be poured into football at Florida State. At his final press conference before the Orange Bowl, Fisher said the Seminoles will only be able to compete with the nation’s elite programs if they keep up in terms of infrastructure, staffing and salaries.
He added that FSU’s administration had made “a huge commitment” to investing those resources, and he added that he was going to, “hold them to it. You can bank on it.”
“I’m not spoiled. But if we’re gonna do it, I know how things are being done,” Fisher said at the time. “I know the way things are done, and we have to do it if we’re going to stay at that level.”
* WARCHANT EXTRA: How feasible is this project? Warchant managing editor Ira Schoffel shares his thoughts and more details on the Tribal Council
When asked about those comments this week, Thrasher said Fisher and FSU's administrators are all on the same page when it comes to wanting what's best for the university.
“Just as I support our academic endeavors, certainly the face of Florida State for a lot of folks is the football program,” Thrasher said. “We’ve had an elite program for a long time, and we want to continue to have an elite program. …
“I love Jimbo. I want to give him everything he wants. Sometimes it may not happen right away, and he knows that. Jimbo would like an operations center, and I understand that. I get it. And before I leave [as president], I hope we can get to that point.”
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