news-record.com

Besides players, pads and helmets, what do you need to play a football game?

Bare bones: A field 120 yards long, two goal posts, two locker rooms, a scoreboard and a place for spectators to sit.

It's way, way beyond bare bones at the six college football programs with the highest attendance in North Carolina.

During the national building boom that has swept across the college football landscape in the last dozen years, those programs -- North Carolina, N.C. State, Wake Forest, Duke, East Carolina and Appalachian State -- have spent somewhere north of $358.6 million on bricks-and-mortar facilities.

And they've done it in the worst economic climate in the United States since the Great Depression, using little or no public money.

This year alone in the real world, the University of North Carolina system, which includes four of those schools, has suffered more than $414 million in budget cuts and eliminated more than 3,000 jobs statewide.

But this year in the sports world, North Carolina opened the $70 million Blue Zone and Lowdermilk Center in Kenan Stadium's east end zone. Wake Forest has a huge new video board set to light up Deacon Hill at BB&T Field. And Duke, which hasn't finished .500 in the last 16 years, opened Pascal Field House, an indoor practice field.

Richard Southall, who leads the College Sport Research Institute in Chapel Hill, has watched the trends for the last 11 years.

"Historically, during the Great Depression, there was a good deal of athletics facility construction going on," Southall said. "It was being used by governments to stimulate the economy and put people to work. But when you're financing it, when it's done privately through foundations and athletic associations -- I wouldn't characterize it as a problem, but a lot of people don't understand how it works."

The front porch

John Swofford, the ACC commissioner, likes to call sports "the front porch" of any college or university.

Well-kept or broken down, sports are a visible thing people on the outside see when they look at a school. People who couldn't find South Bend, Ind., on a map know what Notre Dame's football stadium looks like. They've seen Touchdown Jesus on TV.

It's those first impressions that have driven all the construction.

And the money to pay for it? Alumni, donors and booster clubs like to gather on the front porch Saturday afternoons.

"You have to have something tangible to ask your donors to contribute to," said Southall, who leads a national faculty think-tank that analyzes sports-related issues. "It's one thing to ask for help with a scholarship fund. But if you're asking for an academic center for excellence, and, oh, by the way, it's an increase in club seating, that's very tangible."

So the fundraising -- and spending -- goes on, even in a crummy economy.

Amy Perko is the executive director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which since 1989 has advocated for policies to ensure sports fit within colleges' educational missions. She said data compiled nationwide from 2005 to 2009 showed per-student spending grew about twice as fast for athletics than for academics.

Knight Commission data also showed FBS programs got only about a quarter of their money from institutional fees, Perko said, with the rest coming from "generated revenues" -- ticket sales, donations and TV deals.

That has funded the building boom. But it comes with a significant debt risk, Perko said.

"College sports is hugely popular, and the public sees games on TV and reads about big TV contracts," she said. "The basic belief is that all college sports are creating profits for the university. It's important to understand the real economics of college sports, and that is: Only 22 top-level programs finished in the black."

Perko said the data analysis looked strictly at the numbers and did not identify the schools by name.

Getting good players

So why spend? Why build and build, then build some more?

The projects have accompanied a mixed bag of results on the field. App has won three national titles and become an FCS power. East Carolina and Wake Forest have won league titles. North Carolina and N.C. State won bowl games last season. But there have also been plenty of losing records and mediocrity among the four ACC schools.

Ask a coach -- any coach -- why modern, glitzy, top-of-the-line facilities are important. The answer is always the same:

Recruiting.

"It's an outward, visible sign that we're committed to play football at the highest level," N.C. State coach Tom O'Brien said. "That's what facilities show. Certainly our building, a lot of kids &ellipses; from outlying states, they're wowed by the facilities. That gives you an opportunity, a hook that maybe somebody else doesn't have."

Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe won an ACC title the year after Wake launched a six-phase renovation plan. Phase three, the $48 million Deacon Tower, was still on the drawing board.

"Kids like to go places where they see progress," Grobe said. "That's the key for us. We're never going to be bigger, we're never going to spend more money than anybody else. But what we can do is make all of our facilities really nice and have ongoing projects each year to try to improve our facilities. Because that's what helps in recruiting.

"The kids notice when you're making facility improvements. The recruiting is very important because if you win games, you're going to make money. Basically the fans want to come see good football teams."

And if the fans come and you make money? What then?

The cash goes back into the program, Southall said.

"What any athletics director doesn't want to do is return money back to their school's general fund," he said. "Someone summed it up by saying, 'We eat what we kill.' You get a big payout from a bowl game, you spend it all."

Spending on facilities makes good recruiting sense, because it's one of few area unregulated by the NCAA. Scholarships and campus visits and other recruiting tools fall under NCAA guidelines. Thus, they're pretty much the same from school to school.

Outside of winning and losing, the biggest ways for schools to differentiate themselves from one another is through facilities.

"It's a false economy," Southall said. "Because you're not paying your labor 40 to 60 percent the way you would in the business world. Those costs are gone, and that frees up revenue and income to be spent on facilities."

In effect, it becomes a barter system. A trade of facilities for services.

"You're competing for a player, but you can't offer that player more money," Southall said. "What you can do is say, 'Look at our new weight room. Look at our stadium. Look how much we're on TV.' And you can tell the parents, 'Look at our new academic support facility.' "

Bang for the buck

Even so, you cannot simply build for the sake of building. Not in this economy.

"Improving facilities is a natural desire," N.C. State athletics director Debbie Yow said. "But at some point, an athletics director and coach must realize that having 56,000 seats in a stadium instead of 62,000 is not a negative factor in recruiting. &ellipses; That means there is no reason to spend millions of dollars to add seats, unless the program is sold out for years and years, with a waiting list for tickets."

And when the recruits come, the best buildings are the ones people use.

"The biggest issue that's really difficult to measure is what it does in the development of your players once they're here," Duke coach David Cutcliffe said. "Most of these facilities are shared. &ellipses; We just built the indoor facility, and our regular students will have the opportunity in the evening hours to use it. If you're smart when you're building them, there's a lot of different ways it's going to enhance the entire university."

Maybe. But in the end, the money spent on facilities amounts to an investment in football.

How do you judge the return on the investment? How can you tell if you've gotten bang for your buck?

"I'm not sure how it can be measured in wins or losses," N.C. State coach O'Brien said, "other than you're either a winning program or you're not."

Contact Jeff Mills at 373-7024 or jeff.mills@news-record.com