Well, it is June and there is not much to talk about right now. The Mids are doing summer cruises, Marine Corps training (hoorah!), taking some leave or taking summer classes. So news out of “The Yard” is pretty slow. Even Scott Strasemeier, Navy’s Sports Information Director, was rumored to have been pacing Ricketts Hall muttering “I hope something happens this month or else I’ll be forced to take leave!” Unfortunately, there still isn’t much happening. But we do have an ESPN article that is sort of related to our world.

Yesterday, Mitch Sherman posted an ESPN article on the Cost of Recruiting. It’s a short piece but it’s worth reading. Overall, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. With a few exceptions (e.g., Boise State), the biggest baddest FBS schools generally spend the most on recruiting. No shock there.

What might shock the average college football fan is the amount Army ($512,000) and Air Force ($336,000) spent on recruiting. Navy did not provide a number. That’s some pretty hefty spending on first glance. Of course, what many people don’t realize is that the service academies are recruiting nationwide. Take a look at the big school on any given Saturday and you’ll see that their teams are stocked with local kids. Georgia has a lot of kids from Georgia; LSU has a lot of kids from Louisiana; Florida has a lot of kids from Florida. You get the point. The service academies don’t have a regional focus and they shouldn’t; but nationwide recruiting costs a lot of money if you want to do a good job and fight for a limited pool of athletes that are interested in playing FBS football and also serve as military officers. Travel expenses are a major factor. Many service members who read this blog know that a two week cross country temporary additional duty (TAD) trip can cost $5,000 when you include airfare, hotels, rental car, per diem, et al. Now, start applying these costs to multiple football coaches and multiple trips and you can see how costly recruiting can get.  That’s just the travel budget.  We’re not even talking about all the other expenses like those shiny brochures.

Two other things jumped out at me:

-Tennessee is spending almost $1.5 million on recruiting. That’s $500K more than Alabama and it leads all other programs that submitted data. Wow. That’s saying something. What that’s saying is anyone’s guess. Tennessee has had a difficult time since Phil Fulmer stepped down as head coach in 2008. So you’d expect some type of recruiting emphasis, but I don’t know how you justify that recruiting budget given that Tennessee’s season ticket sales are slumping along with the football team.

-Georgia Tech is spending $883K on recruiting, which is $260K more than its arch rival Georgia. I have no idea what accounts for this, but I have a feeling Coach Paul Johnson is spending more money to look for the type of players that fit his spread option offense. Perhaps our Rambling Wreck readers can comment below.

In case you missed the news, Phase IV of the renovations to NMCMS is scheduled to begin this year and be completed by 2015. These renovations include HD video boards, a new media center, new locker rooms, club level seating (more on that in another post), and a new recruiting center. But what I want to concentrate on first and foremost is this:

We’re going to see a capacity increase to 40,000 by 2015

According to the 2003 media guide, NMCMS had a seating capacity of 30,000. That was expanded to 34,000 for the 2004 season. With the 40,000 seats by 2015, that means we’ll have seen a 33% increase in seating, not to mention the other significant upgrades around the facility

First, I’d like to address the notion that this is in order to meet some sort of minimum the Big East has. This is incorrect as such a minimum does not exist. But we certainly are on the small size of the current and future members

SDSU	70,561	Qualcomm Stadium
Temple	68,532	Lincoln Financial Field
USF	65,857	Raymond James Stadium
Memphis	62,380
Louisville	56,000
Rutgers	52,454
UCF	45,301
Connecticut	40,000
Boise	37,000
Cincinnati	35,097
Navy	34,000	Expanding to 40,000 by 2015
Houston	32,000	New 40k Stadium in 2014
SMU	32,000

Adding another 6,000 seats to NMCMS would put Navy on pretty even terms with the conference average. Three of the schools on the list play in pro stadiums, so we really can’t look at them as a part of the average. Houston is building a new stadium that will seat 40,000 when it’s finished in 2014. So if we exclude the former and adjust for the latter, the average capacity of members of the Big East in 2015 is going to be just a hair over 44,000.

Since the 2004 renovations, the lowest attended game was in 2004 against Northeastern. Just 25,115 people showed up to watch the second game of what was bound to be a wonderful 10-2 season. All told, that was one of only 6 games since 2004 that failed to break the 30k mark.

By comparison, there have been SEVENTEEN games at NMCMS where we have been above capacity. The record was set in the 2008 season when Pitt came to town. 37,970 people jammed in that day, putting attendance at 112% of capacity. Air Force routinely brings massive crowds, averaging 109% capacity. Rutgers, a future Big East foe, has brought an average of 36,118 to the three games they’ve played at NMCMS (106%).

Across all 42 games played at NMCMS since expansion, Navy has averaged 33,109 people per game, which is 97% of full capacity. In 2011, Navy was #9 in the country for attendance by percent of capacity with 101.8%. Air Force, ECU, and Delaware were all over-capacity sellouts while Troy and Southern Miss each fell just a few hundred tickets shy of capacity, both having 98% attendance.

To put it relative to the greater college football universe, the following schools had higher capacity attendance in 2011 than Navy:

1. Oregon
2. TCU
3. Nebraska
4. Texas A&M
5. Oklahoma
6. Texas Tech
7. Ohio State
8. Michigan

That’s it. Not bad company to keep.

Just to parse the attendance a little more, since 2004 Navy’s had:

• 17 games over capacity. That’s 40% of all games.
• 9 games in the 95-100% range. Yep – 62% of all games have been over 95% full.
• 7 more in the 90-95% range. That’s 79% of games with at least 30,600 people attending.

So the demand has been there. But it’s not just as easy as adding seats and watching the dough roll in. In part 2, we’ll look at the challenges of getting those attendance numbers as well as the finances behind them.