The screwy thing about me posting this is that I wasn’t spurred to think about this by John Canzano. I just read most of the report created for EWU about their athletic situation. I guarantee you, BTW, that the report created for Portland State will be very similar, including the holes in it that you can at least drive a minivan through.
https://www.d2football.com/top-10-d2-stadiums-2020/
EWU has plucked $5 million from a single donor and, over the course of 19 months, has been able to raise $1 million otherwise for a $25 million project that won’t even expand capacity. That, to me, is the real value of the 2010 national championship in Cheney. If they were able to strike when the iron was hot, that would very likely have been more successful.
https://www.ewu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TPG-Final-Report_Feb2021.pdf
This is that EWU report. The point it makes about hiring infilled fundraiser positions is probably a good one, but a smarter report has cold-called “possible donors” to determine if the money EWU wants can even be found. It also interestingly posted student results after everyone else’s, which I find entertaining.
Having said that...
(1) While you couldn’t pay me enough to decide on the fate of the EWU AD right now, they can’t realistically cut a sport without either obviously dropping a division or perhaps unjustifiably spending money to ramp up a new sport.
(2) You’ve seen me turn from stadium whore to stadium cynic over 10-11 years here. So you can imagine the negativity I have felt during the pandemic about money availability; can anything get done. Meanwhile (besides Viking Pavilion), there’s a dozen soccer stadiums under construction or drafted up, the ECHL gets 2-3 more new buildings in the next couple years, and there’s kind of a “new WPA mindset” out there at present. So there’s a chance EWU is at that now-or-never point right freaking now. And I’ll argue the same is true with Portland State.
As for PSU, when JC suggested a new downtown stadium was imperative, my first reaction was a chuckle. The issue is WHERE. Pre-pandemic, PSU was rolling the dice on a deal with PPS at Lincoln HS, and that’s evidently dead. The only two places I’ve otherwise been able to suggest were to basically consume current campus assets... and do so creatively. What the pandemic (and maybe other things, but primarily the pandemic) has done is to temporarily arrest property values downtown. MAYBE that creates an opportunity, but as the vaccine rolls forward and property values elsewhere are rocketing, I have to say “now or never” succinctly describes any football facility desires for Portland State.
