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College Football

Penn State football: Is the argument about outdated facilities on the money?

Luke Glusco

By Luke Glusco

Published:

How to catch up to the likes of Alabama, Clemson and — especially — big brother to the west, Ohio State?

That has been the puzzle for Penn State football for going on 4 decades now, and a burning question since James Franklin announced his quest to move the program to elite status.

Penn State has had its moments in the 35 years since its 2nd and most recent national championship. There was the unbeaten 1994 team that deserved at least a share of the national title. There have been plenty of unbeaten runs deep into seasons, plenty of top-10 finishes.

But there has been nothing approaching elite status, which has been defined in the modern age by the programs enumerated above. Those programs go to the CFP not just occasionally, but often. And they win it, sometimes twice in a row. It’s an exclusive club, and hard as heck to crash.

One theory suggests that Penn State can’t play at the high-stakes table because it hasn’t anted up. It hasn’t bought in with its facilities. Apparently, construction on the roughly $50 million worth of upgrades to the Lasch Building isn’t happening fast enough, and the new bells and whistles will already be outdated by the time they’re ready.

That’s part of the argument, anyway, coming from some of the power brokers at the university, including former player and current Board of Trustees member Brandon Short.

If Penn State wants to play at the highest level, it has to pay at the highest level. Short and others suggest Franklin’s main objective isn’t to line his own pockets but to acquire the best staff and facilities that money can buy. After all, Nittany Lions football is worth it.

The argument isn’t without merit. Do a search for “best college football facilities,” and you’ll find plenty of lists that don’t have Penn State in the top 25. You won’t find many, if any, that don’t have Ohio State in the top 10. Northwestern and Illinois show up more than Penn State.

Once the upgrades to Lasch and other facilities are complete, PSU might work its way onto more of such lists. But it probably won’t come close to matching the unquestioned leader of the football facility arms race — Clemson.

Here’s what Penn State is up against:

 

And there’s no guarantee that such an investment would pay off. Texas A&M and South Carolina provide their players similar country club and spa accommodations, and they’re both still waiting to crash the CFP party. Penn State could join this race and wind up following the Aggies and Gamecocks right off a financial cliff. And the chase won’t ever end. Ohio State, Alabama and Clemson — especially Clemson! — will just spend more. At some point, it just gets silly.

I’m all for state of the art training and health maintenance equipment, and wouldn’t begrudge a student athlete some fun during down time. But maybe priorities are out of whack if Clemson’s players have so much time for miniature golf, bowling and Wiffle ball, to name just a few of the amenities they enjoy.

Penn State can’t outspend these elite programs, even if it wanted to. Their biggest donors are richer and more football-passionate, and they have more of them.

And if PSU did reach the top simply by throwing extreme amounts of money at its perceived problem, wouldn’t that cheapen the accomplishment? At least a little bit? Joe Paterno made Penn State football what it is with a mantra of “success with honor.” His grand experiment worked: He won 2 national championships with athletes who were also honest-to-goodness students.

As someone who matriculated at Penn State’s main campus between those 2 championship seasons in the 1980s, I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t the facilities that drew those players to State College and Paterno’s program. The building that housed the weight room wasn’t much bigger than the adjacent army barracks-turned-dormitories in Nittany Halls. (Shout out to my buddies from the long-since bulldozed Nittany 28 and Nittany 34.)

This, most certainly, is a different era. The upgrades are in progress. If Short has his way, the athletic department will spend even more on the program, year-to-year, than it does now. Done right, it can work. You have to spend money to make money, as the saying goes. And the football income makes good things possible for the rest of the university.

I love Penn State football. When I have the chance to be in the stands at Beaver Stadium, I enjoy it as much now as I did all those years ago in the student section. And the experience is at its best when the team is winning a lot and can match up evenly with the best programs in the land.

If some extra cash, well spent, can revitalize the legacy, I’m all for it. And Penn State has already made the commitment. When it’s all said and done, more than $100 million will be spent over a 10-year period for improvements to the Lasch Building and surrounding facilities. A “quarterback lab” is among the upgrades. And there’s nothing wrong with the facilities as they are. One website’s fairly recent rankings had them as 13th best in the nation. The notion that the Lasch Building is some sort of dump is complete bunk. It was a huge upgrade when built in 1999 and has had regular renovations since. The equipment and meeting spaces are plenty good enough to run a big-time college program.

If Penn State wants to pour even more money into the program in the hopes of bigger profits and greater on-field success, well, hey, it’s not my money … and it might make my Saturdays in the fall even more entertaining.

My only caution would be this: There has to be a limit. At some point, excessively pampering teenagers doesn’t create great football players or great men.

Dabo Swinney didn’t buy a national championship with a swank facility, he bought the facility with 6 straight 10-win seasons culminating in a national championship. Since the new building went up in 2017, the Tigers have gone right on winning. They added a 2nd natty in 2018 and still have a shot in this “down year” to extend their streak of 10-win seasons to 11.

Meanwhile, the other Power 5 program in South Carolina has gone right on chasing its rooster tail despite expensive digs that include a movie theater, barber shop and recording studio (courtesy of Darius Rucker). In 247Sports’ breakdown, South Carolina ranks No. 5 in the country for facilities 2 years running. The Gamecocks haven’t had 10 wins in a season since going 11-2 in 2013. Since that rare high point under Steve Spurrier, for all their spending, they’ve gone 43-53. First-year coach Shane Beamer is off to a 5-5 start.

Maybe you do have to pay to win these days. But there’s a lot more that goes into it. Invest wisely, Nittany Inc.

Luke Glusco

Luke Glusco is a Penn State graduate and veteran journalist. He covers Penn State and occasionally writes about other Big Ten programs and topics. He also serves as the primary copy editor for Saturday Tradition.