John Canzano interviewed Rob Mullens, and I was surprised to hear that expanding Autzen by 10-12,000 is probably NOT in our future?

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JC: Saturday’s football game against Indiana will be sold out. It feels like you could use 5,000 more seats or maybe some upgraded club or suites that you could upsell. It feels like there’s some money out there for the University of Oregon to recoup. Where do you stand on the expansion of Autzen Stadium or some upgrades?

RM: "We love Autzen Stadium. It is a tremendous home-field advantage and tremendous experience, and it’ll be sold out on Saturday. And trending very close to being sold-out for the rest of the year. We’ll have standing-room-only tickets on Saturday. So it’ll be packed, it’ll be loud.

That’s something we are always studying. We’re in the middle of a significant facility project right now. I can see out my window in our new indoor football practice facility. And then once we get through that, obviously, we’ll start (looking at it).

We’re always thinking about Autzen, and now we have this new $20.5 million line item (revenue sharing) and the financial pressures of ‘What can we do?’ to increase our base and fund third-party NIL to our student athletes.

The formula has changed a little bit. Football generates 80 percent of the revenue here. Autzen is our economic engine. And obviously, we want to make sure that we’re staying at the forefront with our fan experience in Autzen, particularly as we’re having success."

JC: Could you ever imagine building a new stadium? Or would it always be, what could you do to Autzen?

RM: "It would always be, what can you do to Autzen? It’s a special place, and we want to make sure that we continue to have that huge home-field advantage that it presents to itself. There are some limitations because of the number of parking spaces and traffic, just the road infrastructure. That’s one of the things that I thought you captured well (in your reporting from Penn State). When you look out at Penn State and you just see tailgating forever, the amount of parking in proximity to the stadium is pretty impressive.

JC: If you had unlimited seats, how many could you sell for Saturday’s game against Indiana?

RM: Yeah. The thing that’s always complicated with that is, obviously, we’re a top five football program in a top-10 matchup. But you always want to make sure that you have the number that’s right. That you’re packed and you keep the atmosphere. But I don’t think you ever want to overbuild.

When it’s rolling, yeah, sure. There probably is some left on the table. But I think for us, with the road infrastructure, the parking, as we look at it and deliver the experience that we want to deliver, there may be a few more thousand (seats) there, but I don’t think it’s significant."

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I could not bring you the whole interview, but Mullens expressed concern with making the budget these days considering the new additional cost of NIL, and the cost of providing the resources to create outside NIL to athletes. I sense things are tighter and tougher than being discussed, and I am surprised about Autzen, since I thought we could sell another 10,000 seats for Big-10 games for most of the season.

Another thing to consider is how many more Duck fans are you going to bring in vs opposing fans. As a small population state, we’re likely close to maxed out on OBD fans but would easily bring in several thousand more opposing fans negating our raucous advantage.

Getting to 70,000 would be awesome, but is that even feasible or wanted in Eugene?

Parking for 10k more? Would 10k more come from PDX to watch? Would prices go up or down?

3 minutes ago, WTD25 said:

Getting to 70,000 would be awesome, but is that even feasible or wanted in Eugene?

Parking for 10k more? Would 10k more come from PDX to watch? Would prices go up or down?

I think it is clear....Mullens would not expand by 10K. A few thousand more--perhaps. He will want to leverage more suites and high-end opportunities which don't take much space, but generate revenue.

I think 60K is tops, probably from 54K to 57K, and standing room...