I love all the "Josh is a smart guy but" posts in here. Show me your Bronze Tablet and law degree. You think he doesn't do his research for what things are worth and weighs them against the value he thinks he can extract?
Gies Memorial Stadium
*Bronze tablet while playing D1 football and scoring TDs
Marc Andreessen is another billionaire Illini alum. But we sued him claiming he had stolen the Mosiac browser. So there's another rich alum we've pissed off.
RabidDawgClassic
- Los Angeles, CA
I’ve been pretty straightforward with my opinion that, in the current state of college athletics, you have to take extraordinary measures to stay competitive. If selling the naming rights to Memorial Stadium was something that needed to be done to field a winning football team, then it had to be done. It’s debatable whether Gies’ $100-mill will help with that and it’s also debatable as to whether that amount was underselling it. But no one wants a stadium — a memorial or otherwise — to be consistently empty because the home team is pathetic.
Where I take offense (if that’s even the right word) is the blatant insult to our intelligence in:
1. Saying it’s okay because Gies’ dad was a veteran, and
2. Saying the $100 million was a “gift” when it was clearly a business transaction.
It’s insulting to think the Illinois fanbase, as a whole, would just accept the whole “we’re not selling out the military history of the stadium because Larry Gies’ dad was a veteran too. So… we cool?” If you’re gonna sell out the soldiers whose names are on the columns, at least have the balls to own it.
As for the gift… if Gies was truly giving it without expecting anything in return, then no offer to rename the stadium in his honor should ever have been brought up. For tax purposes, it may be considered a donation… but in reality, Gies got something of significant value in return for his money.
Where I take offense (if that’s even the right word) is the blatant insult to our intelligence in:
1. Saying it’s okay because Gies’ dad was a veteran, and
2. Saying the $100 million was a “gift” when it was clearly a business transaction.
It’s insulting to think the Illinois fanbase, as a whole, would just accept the whole “we’re not selling out the military history of the stadium because Larry Gies’ dad was a veteran too. So… we cool?” If you’re gonna sell out the soldiers whose names are on the columns, at least have the balls to own it.
As for the gift… if Gies was truly giving it without expecting anything in return, then no offer to rename the stadium in his honor should ever have been brought up. For tax purposes, it may be considered a donation… but in reality, Gies got something of significant value in return for his money.
I didn't know the complete story but here is Andreesen's side - he was the one that sued Illinois....for a reason.
Illini92and96
- Austin, TX
To add on to this. What if Gies said, I plan to give $100M now and then $100M every 5 years for the rest of my life, based on how he plans to spend and pass on his immense wealth. Would ~$750M lifetime be worth naming rights? Heck, what if he said when I die, you can get 20% of my $5B net worth? Seems like either scenario would be naming rights worthy consideration.
We just don't know the real plans, so @sultan of grange grove I don't think we know the whole picture of what we are likely to get from Gies as a result of this relationship.
I don’t agree. They slapped “State Farm” on the Assembly Hall pretty easily.
I think there’s definitely some reasonable points brought up here that you are exchanging naming rights FOREVER…for whatever Geis was willing to donate RIGHT NOW. Maybe $100 mil was what Josh thought was reasonable. To me it’s like winning the lottery. You either take a smaller lump sum, or get it all in an annuity. And Josh said give me the money now.
I think overall the construction of the Scoreboard is a net positive only because it’s so unique. I think a middle tier or even lower brand like Illinois football benefits greatly from having the “biggest” something. Something that differentiates them from other schools. Could it even be a tourist attraction for people that would otherwise not consider buying a ticket, just to see it? I do. So I think it was money well spent in the long term.
Money towards the roster is a separate discussion. We’re in a weird spot in college sports (that doesn’t even exist in pro sports bc those leagues have some form of salary caps or penalties for going over), where if you as a donor or pretend owner of a college team wants your team to win badly enough, you can spend as much as you want to make it happen.
Does Illinois have any of these people in their fanbase? That’s Josh’s main goal I think now. He needs to recruit some deep pocket “owners”, who he himself trusts and that trust him. More than just Geis.
This conversation is about more than stadiums, big donors, or even private equity. The root cause of our woes is an insatiable need for cash to fund soaring salaries. Each school is desperately scrounging up all they can lay their hands on to feed into in the bidding war for a finite pool of talent.
The article below highlights our struggle to climb or just hold our place in the NIL pecking order. Good leadership only goes so far.
writingillini.com
The article below highlights our struggle to climb or just hold our place in the NIL pecking order. Good leadership only goes so far.
The biggest problem facing the Illinois football program is external
It is pretty clear that the Illinois football program has a problem. It is not something that a new coaching staff or an influx of transfer portal players can c
writingillini.com
You're not even looking at this objectively.
Biggest recent naming rights sale was Arkansas, which is $5.4MM/yr. for 13 years ($70MM total). What's the present value of that? $38MM (10% discount rate)? Well, we got $100MM NOW (allegedly, not sure they officially said how Gies' gift was structured).
And since there's no contractual component to Gies Memorial Stadium naming, we could still sell that down the road if we needed too (again, by weighing the value of the dollars Gies is still actively giving the DIA against any corporate naming deal). That deal was also not just a naming rights deal - they sold several assets for that price (official banking partner and official sponsor - it was basically CommunityAmerica trying to buy the deposits of 40k students and faculty in a market they're expanding too).
We also still retain the field naming rights. We're in a materially different market than USC (obviously), but they sold just the field naming rights for $69MM over 16 years (~$34MM npv). It's still LA Memorial Coliseum (United Airlines Field).
It was a fantastic business move, no matter how you slice it. Mega donors are a great way to entice other donors as well (mega rich people love outdoing other mega rich people).
I'm hoping Shad Khan's presence Saturday follows through with this.
Just having a bunch of rich alumni isn't the key. I mean that helps, but if that's all it took, then Harvard and Yale would dominate college sports.
Getting donors of all levels involved is pretty important outside of the guys like Gies who can just underwrite a whole sport if they wanted too. And Whitman has been absolutely fantastic at total philanthropic activity alongside fostering Larry Gies - he's gone from the $15MM/yr range to consistently getting $50MM/yr (excluding Gie's $100MM drop) from the wide-donor base over his tenure.
We get consistently higher annual donor totals to the DIA than Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc. Now... is this the best way to support a football team? Probably not, since we're towards the bottom in football NIL roster spending, but it's definitely the best way to get better facilities in case kids start to care about that in the future.