Penn State Sports Magazine
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3 6 J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 2 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M the student-athlete experience on their campuses look like a four-year Carnival cruise. Clemson's Allen N. Reeves Football Complex cost $55 million and has a basketball court, a slide and a minia- ture golf course. Texas A&M's Bright Football Complex has been likened to a five-star resort, although you'd be hard-pressed to think of a resort that has flat-screen TVs built into the rest- room mirrors. Out west, Oregon has some of the priciest facilities in the country, thanks to its association with Nike. If you thought that bathroom TVs were the height of indulgence, check out the Ducks' self-cleaning lockers or the digital mirror at the Marcus Mariota Sports Performance Center in which recruits can view themselves in one of the team's many uniform combinations. Or if you aren't interested in Oregon's inner sanctum, just drive past Autzen Stadium and gawk at the largest video board in college football, a $12 million project that was completed in 2020. That's the kind of stuff Franklin could talk about all day. But given that he's hardly a neutral observer, he believes his message would be more resonant if he weren't always the one leading the conversation. "I actually think it's important for it to come from others," he said. "I think that could be media that get to travel to other places and venues, that could be from coaches on our staff who have worked at other places. I think that would be a great question for you guys [in the media] to ask." Challenge accepted. While the nation's biggest programs have been making headlines with their Taj Mahal construction projects, the Big Ten has been undergoing a transforma- tion of its own. Here's a look at what Penn State's competitors have been up to in recent years: ILLINOIS The Illini opened the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Center in 2019 at a cost of $79.2 million. The 107,650-square-foot facility features an expanded weight room, a sports med- icine suite, new coaches' offices and meeting rooms, an outdoor seating area with a balcony overlooking the practice fields and a players' lounge with pool, ping-pong and foosball tables, as well as two bowling lanes. Dick Butkus greets visitors in the form of a larger-than-life statue out- side the lobby. High-end lighting fix- tures and tinted woodgrain walls might not call to mind the gritty, old-school milieu that Illinois legends like Butkus evoke, but hey, it's 2022. You do what you gotta do. INDIANA The Hoosiers have upgraded their football headquarters in tandem with Memorial Stadium. When the uni- versity spent $38 million to enclose the stadium's north end zone in 2009, it also expanded the team meeting rooms, coaches' offices and locker room. In 2018, Indiana took a similar approach with its next project, spending $53 mil- lion on a south end zone overhaul that also brought an athletic development and nutrition center. The university's most recent addition is the 25,000-square-foot Terry Tal- len Football Complex, which opened in 2019 beneath the stadium's west stands. IOWA Hawkeyes staffers visited a dozen schools around the country to figure out what they wanted, then spent $55 million to build the Hansen Football Performance Complex. The building, which opened in 2015, centralized their football operations, putting the team's training table, strength equipment, meeting rooms and indoor practice field all under one roof. The signage includes banners pro- claiming: "The battle is won before it is fought" and "Culture trumps talent and strategy." Fitting aphorisms for a program that depends on player devel- opment rather than annual five-star re- cruiting hauls to compete at a high level. MARYLAND The Terps found a clever use for their former basketball arena, pulling the seats out of Cole Field House and transforming it into an indoor prac- tice facility at a cost of $196 million. The building, rechristened the Jones-Hill House, opened in 2017 and features a theater-style team meeting room, a caf- eteria, coaches' offices and a recruiting lounge. MICHIGAN You would expect the Wol- verines to have first-class facilities, and they do. Built in 1990, Schembechler Oregon spent $12 million in 2020 to equip Autzen Stadium with a 12,276-square-foot video scoreboard, the largest of its kind in college football. PHOTO BY MATT HERB