Re: Arizona State Moving To D1
But I'm saying when the big boys say they're definitely getting in the game, things that would sink a smaller school won't even slow ASU down.
This
should be true in this case. Perhaps it is. But, they sure announced this with what sounded like very little planning or forethought. When you announce something like this, and then admit you have no idea where you are playing,
next season, at the press conference where ASU announced this, one has to wonder just how many of the ducks are in a row here.
As I said earlier in the thread, the land, even if it is currently available on campus, is not a slam dunk. This is public, state institution spending taxpayer's tax dollars and universities have things like master plans for their campuses. I bet there is nothing in ASU's master plan about land use for a hockey arena. It is going to take some sort of discussion to use land they may already own suitable for the purpose, even. I'm not familiar with Arizona law, obviously, but there is no way this happens without some fairly serious discourse about it on a number of levels by a variety of entities with in that state.
Once that hurdle is cleared, then there is the little matter of funding the actual design and construction of a hockey facility. As I said earlier in the thread, the going rate for that, for a dual rink facility (which is almost certainly what they will need), both at Penn State and currently at UNO was and is about 90 million dollars, at least. Unless a donor comes forth, that is big expenditure of state money for a hockey facility. A school the size of Penn State needed the single biggest donation in the history of the school, let alone to the Athletic Department, to pull this off and about half of the cost of UNO's building has been donated.
When it comes down to brass tacks for public funding of this facility (which as things stand
right this second, would be a necessity) we'll see just how interested in hockey the state legislature in Arizona really is in this as well as the school's governing body. I have to think that some donor or donor arm of the university is going to
have to be involved, and, in a big way.
No matter what, all of this is going to take some time. As I also said earlier in the thread, I can't see any way this is done in anything less than 4-6 years and that is if all of these processes start
today.
The way this got announced (if you didn't see the actual press conference, watch it) it looked for all the world like this was a knee jerk reaction to this sudden donor gift of money to move the program up (kids at Christmas was sort of the vibe) and little more than that sounded very well thought out. They didn't give real substantive answers at the announcement press conference about much of anything of import. They very much talked in hypotheticals. I didn't get warm fuzzies about it, anyway.
And, FWIW, I just did a quick Google News search using the term "Arizona State Hockey" and I could not find any news stories since this announcement was made that talks about or addresses any these "logistics concerns" or that they are somehow even starting to be addressed. We are less than 10 months away from the beginning of next season, now.
I'm very skeptical about this on a number of fronts unless that are much larger machinations going at the conference level within in the Pac-12 that we don't know about.
