BleedGopher
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Per The Athletic:
LUBBOCK, Texas — A pair of flat-top cranes loom high above Jones AT&T Stadium, home of the Texas Tech Red Raiders. Head football coach Joey McGuire is sporting a hard hat, safety glasses and reflective vest, bracing himself to make good on a friendly social-media pledge: 3,000 retweets, and he’d climb one of these suckers.
Straight up, 220 feet into the air, McGuire’s breath shortens and chest tightens with each rung. When he finally hits the top, he exhales in equal parts relief and terror. Then he peeks over the edge, hand clasped to the railing, to catch a sky-scraping glimpse of the kingdom he stands to inherit. Beneath his feet is $230 million worth of planned construction, part of a massive, ongoing facilities project that will renovate the stadium’s south end zone and add a brand-new football training facility.
That’s a striking investment for any athletics department, including Texas Tech, a proud program but not one of college football’s elites. McGuire’s presence, on the sideline or hundreds of feet above it, has been crucial to turning the project into reality, injecting considerable excitement into the program with an encouraging 8-5 record in 2022.
Another reason — arguably the most significant — lies a few hours south of the stadium, hidden just beneath the surface: oil.
Oil money is not a novel source of big-money boosterism in college sports. T. Boone Pickens famously pumped barrels into Oklahoma State University athletics. But while the transfer portal and name, image and likeness legislation are remodeling college football’s financial and competitive structure, Tech’s windfall is funding both the old-school facilities arms race and new-school NIL marketplace, part of a broader alignment among deep-pocketed supporters and the administration.
“I always tell people, oil money is real,” McGuire says. “I knew the backing was here (when I took the job). But quite honestly, I didn’t dream of what it would be.”
theathletic.com
Go Gophers!!
LUBBOCK, Texas — A pair of flat-top cranes loom high above Jones AT&T Stadium, home of the Texas Tech Red Raiders. Head football coach Joey McGuire is sporting a hard hat, safety glasses and reflective vest, bracing himself to make good on a friendly social-media pledge: 3,000 retweets, and he’d climb one of these suckers.
Straight up, 220 feet into the air, McGuire’s breath shortens and chest tightens with each rung. When he finally hits the top, he exhales in equal parts relief and terror. Then he peeks over the edge, hand clasped to the railing, to catch a sky-scraping glimpse of the kingdom he stands to inherit. Beneath his feet is $230 million worth of planned construction, part of a massive, ongoing facilities project that will renovate the stadium’s south end zone and add a brand-new football training facility.
That’s a striking investment for any athletics department, including Texas Tech, a proud program but not one of college football’s elites. McGuire’s presence, on the sideline or hundreds of feet above it, has been crucial to turning the project into reality, injecting considerable excitement into the program with an encouraging 8-5 record in 2022.
Another reason — arguably the most significant — lies a few hours south of the stadium, hidden just beneath the surface: oil.
Oil money is not a novel source of big-money boosterism in college sports. T. Boone Pickens famously pumped barrels into Oklahoma State University athletics. But while the transfer portal and name, image and likeness legislation are remodeling college football’s financial and competitive structure, Tech’s windfall is funding both the old-school facilities arms race and new-school NIL marketplace, part of a broader alignment among deep-pocketed supporters and the administration.
“I always tell people, oil money is real,” McGuire says. “I knew the backing was here (when I took the job). But quite honestly, I didn’t dream of what it would be.”
Can big oil money unleash college football’s next powerhouse?
Texas Tech’s windfall is funding both the old-school facilities arms race and new-school NIL marketplace as boosters, administration align.
theathletic.com
Go Gophers!!
