Fifth of an five-part series

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Through the window of his office, Andy Geiger, the Ohio State athletic director, watched spiny-necked construction cranes move slowly over Ohio Stadium like giraffes feeding at a concrete bowl.

The 78-year-old football facility was in the early stages of a renovation that would add 82 luxury boxes plus thousands of individual club seats and a $9 million scoreboard that will be the largest in college football.

A year from scheduled completion, the gigantic undertaking already has exceeded its $150 million budget by $40 million – distressing news for an athletic department that recently has spent $110 million for a basketball arena, $10 million for a track stadium, and $4.8 million for a baseball field.

"We're in the middle of as big a project as you can imagine, with a huge, huge price tag," Geiger said. "And we're working as hard as we possibly can to pay for it."

From Tallahassee to Seattle, the nation's universities are in the midst of a mammoth building boom, one that over the last decade has created $4 billion worth of largely taxpayer-subsidized athletic facilities that rival professional sports palaces.

In many elite sports programs, these facilities are the most visible symbols of an athletic system that has grown so dramatically that its connection to education – the core mission of universities – has been obscured.

Betting that flash equals cash, schools are wielding these shiny, amenities-laden buildings like sabers as they vie with rivals for the best running backs and the wealthiest benefactors in college sports' version of an arms race.

"We are competitors," said Geiger, who also has headed athletic programs at Stanford, Penn and Maryland. "What we do is compete. We don't compete internally; we compete externally. It's inter-collegiate. When Brand X does something, Brand Y wants to know how quickly we can get there. So when we invest hugely in facilities, it motivates others to do so. No question about it."

To pay for it all, football and basketball teams – the profit centers of major sports programs – are under constant pressure to succeed, not only on the court and on the field but at the box office. Winning means that schools can lure corporate sponsors and satisfy boosters who line up eagerly to spend money on luxury suites and personal seat licenses.

"These [new facilities] are sold with the promise of luxury suites," said Sheldon Steinbach, the general counsel for the American Council on Education. "And the suites are then sold with the promise of winning teams."

Little of this construction would be possible without the support of American taxpayers – in the form of the sizable deductions contributors can claim on the price of super suites and seat licenses.

On a $200,000 lease, for example, the deduction could be between $125,000 and $150,000. Schools assign a dollar value to use of the suite, game tickets and parking, and declare the rest as charity.

As nonprofit institutions, they are also empowered to issue taxpayer-subsidized, low-interest construction bonds secured with the promise of future luxury-suite and seat-licensing revenue. Ohio State officials estimate that 80 percent of their school's stadium project will be paid for in that way.

"It's a total arms race," Steinbach said. "And you can't afford to unilaterally disarm. That would be death."

Nearly all the major sports facilities in the Big Twelve, for example, are being rebuilt or replaced. Kansas State, long a football doormat in the conference, turned its fortunes around when, after considerable debate in the university community, it installed skyboxes in its stadium. The boxes created more revenue – for athletic scholarships, topflight coaches and facilities – and, ultimately, led to more victories.

In Texas alone, the University of Texas is spending $93 million to refurbish its football stadium – work that includes the adding of 66 suites and a 132,000-square-foot stadium club for big contributors; Texas Tech has recently opened a $57 million, 15,000-seat basketball arena; and Texas A&M has committed $100 million to a new basketball facility and a 22,720-seat addition to its football stadium.

At Nebraska, the football stadium recently was renovated at a cost of $32 million. Elevators, escalators and 36 skyboxes, each seating 10 to 16 people, were added. Some of the boxes require 25-year leases at a cost of $2 million apiece.

At Florida State, there are plans to rebuild or replace facilities for every sport but one. (The exception is cross-country, which doesn't require anything but a locker room.) In football-crazed Tallahassee, the demand for luxury boxes is so great that, before the permanent suites could be finished, portable ones, set atop Doak Campbell Stadium by giant cranes, were used.

"When it comes to sports facilities, if you're standing still, you're going backward," said Jim Weaver, the athletic director at Virginia Tech, the Blacksburg, Va., school whose sudden leap to the top of the college football heap has been accompanied by an ambitious upgrade in facilities.

The skyrocketing cost is ratcheting up the budget arithmetic, particularly at the elite sports schools that are driving the phenomenon.

At Ohio State, whose $73 million sports budget in 1999 was the nation's highest, Geiger has imposed a 5 percent across-the-board budget cut, and the school's board of trustees has declared a moratorium on new sports facilities, at least until the Ohio Stadium renovation is finished in 2001.

By 2003, Ohio State will owe nearly $228 million for construction of athletic facilities – a figure more than 26 times the $8.5 million debt on its books in 1997. The payments on that debt soon will top $16 million annually – five times the 1998 figure and double the entire budgets of some Division I-A athletic departments.

Should the revenues that all of these super-facilities are designed to produce ever decline – or even flatten out – the nation's big-time sports schools will be scrambling like harried quarterbacks to replace them.

"I worry – and I think all my peers at the national level worry – about the finances, whether there will come a day when we can no longer keep up with the pressures financially," said Dave Hart, the Florida State athletic director, whose school is about to embark on a fund-raising effort for athletics seeking more than $70 million for endowed scholarships and facilities.

Some schools are, for the right price, willing to align themselves with corporate interests. The University of Louisville unashamedly named its new, $63 million football facility Papa John's Cardinal Stadium when the local pizza chain's owner paid $5 million for the naming rights. That 42,000-seat facility also includes a Brown & Williamson Club, built with $3 million from the tobacco company and rented out for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

At some universities, fees for sports are being levied on students, even those who plan never to attend a sporting event or who cannot get a ticket. The University of Mississipi not only charged each student a $10 fee to back the bonds for upgrades to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, but it also pledged timber from university-owned forests as collateral.

"When these new arenas and stadiums are announced, the general public thinks it's going to mean more access," said John R. Thelin, a University of Kentucky professor who has written extensively on the strained relationship between athletics and academics. "But the strategy is to provide more suites and luxuries for a very special clientele."

Direct public funding often figures in the equation. Multipurpose arenas, such as Penn State's Bryce Jordan Center and Ohio State's Schottenstein Center, were built with considerable state contributions. Yet these facilities pay no taxes on revenue from the sporting events held there or on the advertising sprinkled liberally throughout their interiors.

In 2000, the cry of the nation's athletic directors might well be"Find me the money!" as they grapple for new ways to fund ballooning budgets.

The building boom, many say, was a logical and necessary next step in their search to supplement bowl, TV and ticket income and sizable government subsidies. The search for new revenues also led to unprecedented corporate alliances and nonstop fund-raising campaigns by booster clubs.

And to ensure that the costly sports palaces remain filled, lavish academic-support centers and state-of-the-art training and practice facilities are being constructed to attract the top high school football and basketball players.

At such places as Virginia Tech and Penn State, even tight ends on the football team have their own high-tech meeting rooms, with the donors' names emblazoned on prominent plaques.

"It's all about recruiting," said Christine Plonsky, associate athletic director at the University of Texas. "What you want is for kids to walk into your place and say, 'Wow! This is nicer than any other place I've been.' "

Nowhere is the trend more striking than on Ohio State's congested campus. Through a combination of fervor and fund-raising, Geiger is transforming a gray and aging network of athletic facilities into the gleaming symbol of 21st-century collegiate sports.

The Ohio Stadium project is the centerpiece. The Knute Rockne-era facility is being drastically redone. In addition to the suites and club seats, dozens of new bathrooms will be added, and aisles will be widened for handicapped patrons. An extra layer – one filled with upscale concession stands – is being wrapped around the structure like a new skin.

"Two or three other times, they've walked up to the threshold of doing something about this and walked away," Geiger said. "It's not a little project, to say the least."

Cost overruns early in the process frightened the university's trustees into declaring the moratorium on athletic projects until the stadium could be completed.

"There was some concern expressed by faculty and administrators that perhaps too much was being devoted to these athletic facilities and not enough to academic projects," then-chairman Michael Colley said.

That meant that Geiger had to shelve plans for a swimming facility and an indoor tennis facility, among other things, though the athletic department has continued to raise money for those projects.

"This is a very large enterprise that we have here," Geiger said. "There's a tremendous amount of energy in it because there is a tremendous amount of interest in it. We're able to sustain 35 sports because of the interest in them. It sounds simple, but I think we're responding to the stimuli."

Not far away from the football stadium, built in 1922 for $1.3 million, is the year-old Value City Arena at the Schottenstein Center, a 20,000-seat basketball and hockey facility that is the costliest on-campus arena ever constructed.

(Ohio State bars commercial associations for campus buildings, but that rule was finessed. Outside, the facility is called the Schottenstein Center after Jerome Schottenstein, the founder of the Value City discount retail chain. Inside, it's the Value City Arena.)

Built for $110 million, with $15 million from the state, the arena contains 46 luxury boxes, making Ohio State one of the few schools to offer them to football, basketball and hockey fans.

The Schottenstein Center's suites sell for $45,000 to $65,000 a year and require a five-year commitment. To purchase the best seats for Ohio State basketball, a fan must put up a $15,000 seat-licensing fee, commit to 40 years' worth of tickets, and then pay a $2,000 annual maintenance fee.

According to Jim Smith – Ohio State's associate athletic director for marketing before he left this year to work with the Columbus Crew soccer team – the Schottenstein Center annually generates $2 million from its suites, $2.5 million from corporate sponsors, and $4.8 million from ticket revenue.

The $25 million in licensing fees will go to pay down the debt, Smith said. The university's general budget gets 5½ cents on every dollar earned to help pay for maintenance and other costs.

"They call it a fee," said Smith, who previously worked for the World Wrestling Federation,"but it's a tax."

Just behind the arena, in an open area along Olentangy River Road, sits the new, $4.8 million Bill Davis Baseball Stadium, a facility equal to any well-appointed minor-league park. The $10 million Jesse Owens Stadium for track and field was built when the Ohio Stadium project resulted in the tearing up of the school's existing track.

The price tag for this spending spree on sports facilities will top $300 million, most of which has been financed by bonds and loans. The indebtedness will be paid off through a combination of state contributions, donations, revenues from the new suites and club seats, and, for the stadium work, a $6 surcharge on football tickets.

And that surcharge is on top of the price of individual game tickets that, at $38 in 1999, were already the most costly in the Big Ten.

Not only has Ohio State incurred huge new costs in flinging up these athletic facilities, it now has unprecedented competition for fans in its own city.

The Nationwide Arena, built for the National Hockey League's Columbus Blue Jackets, an expansion team that will start play this year, could draw concerts and shows away from the Schottenstein Center.

"We went from having no modern multipurpose facilities in Columbus to getting two in little more than a year," Smith said. "Can this town support them both? Only time will tell."

And that understates the situation. The Columbus Crew's new, 22,555-seat stadium could draw some outdoor events away from campus.

Already, the Schottenstein Center and the Nationwide Arena are dividing up the area's business sponsors like lions fighting over a kill.

"We have Huntington Bank, they have Bank One," said Dave Brown, director of signage at Ohio State. "They have Pepsi, we have Coke."

Seventy-four of Ohio Stadium's 82 suites already have been leased. Among those who will be sitting in them in the 2001 season are George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, and Leslie H. Wexner, chairman of The Limited stores.

While those boxes will be filled with football fans enjoying good food and good cheer, other people in the stadium won't be quite as contented. To accommodate the suites, the 2,500 club seats and the growing list of contributors to athletics-related clubs, Ohio State has had to bounce thousands of longtime season-ticket holders to the outer reaches of the stadium.

Andrew Arthur, the director of club seating and luxury suites, conceded that "everyone is concerned" about their seats being moved.

"We intend to reshuffle things every five to seven years," he said. "But the guy with the most points [accumulated for Buckeyes Club contributions] is going to be sitting on the 50-yard line."

That infuriates some veteran Buckeyes backers.

"We've had tickets for more than 40 years," Suzanne Swales of Columbus complained. "I'm an alum. My husband is an alum. His mother was on the faculty. We contribute to the school. But just because we choose not to give to the Buckeyes Club, two years ago, we were moved to temporary seats in the south end zone, and last year, we were stuck with an obstructed view."

The Swaleses don't like the way football tickets are meted out, in essence, to the highest bidders.

"It's scalping, and we refuse to participate," Suzanne Swales said. "It's our belief that the seating priority ought to be students first, then faculty, then alums, then everyone else. But now someone with absolutely no connection to Ohio State can give some money and get better seats than us. It's not 'How long?' that counts anymore. It's 'How much?' "