Martin Stadium expansion may grow on Coug Nation

The four-letter words of the day are “arms race.”

Bad juju. Unnecessary extravagance. Unbridled one-upmanship. Symptom of All That’s Wrong with College Athletics.

But enough about the mink-lined bidets in the University of Oregon locker room.

The subject at hand is home-field advantage, or relative lack thereof, at Washington State University – and not just in won-lost terms, but in revenue, attendance, fan comfort and bargaining power.

If you’ve purchased seats to a Cougars football game this fall, you know the athletic department is itching to run Martin Stadium into the shop for repairs, upgrades and – gulp – expansion, because there’s a $5 “facility fee” added to every ticket. This money is going into the pockets of various consultants, architects, bond lawyers and focus-group gaffers attached to this barely-begun project – each a Sisyphus with his shoulder to the rock.

Shovels will not pierce dirt for probably two years. At this point, no one yet knows what it will look like, but only that it’s necessary.

Expansion? Necessary?

At Wazzu?

As the millennium turned, the Cougars were filling Martin Stadium to all of 70 percent of capacity on game days, a statistical shame that has since been assuaged considerably by A) playing better football and B) revising the seat count downward to 35,117.

That’s right. Downsized. And so we ask again, with only a breath of irony:

Expansion? Necessary?

At Wazzu?

Well, yes, actually. And not just yes, but damned right.

Just last weekend, the Cougars visited Oregon State, and while it’s gratuitously cruel to bring up that bit of heartbreak, the more significant aspect of the trip was a first look at remodeled Reser Stadium. Oregon State plowed something like $80 million into erecting a new structure opposite the press box side, with athletic director Bob DeCarolis borrowing $60 million of it. That’s just phase one of the project, with more work on the end zones coming, plus more seats and other assorted spackle.

“He said he has ‘the best half-stadium in the country,’ ” WSU athletic director Jim Sterk reported, “which I thought was a good line.”

About right, too. It’s not the Taj Mahal and a doublewide side-by-side, exactly, but it’s in that metaphorical ballpark.

This is just part of the flurry of home improvement going on in the Pacific-10 Conference. It’s only been a few years since Oregon boosted the capacity of Autzen Stadium to 54,000. At Washington, athletic director Todd Turner has already jacked up ticket prices to prime the pump – “reinvesting in football,” he called it – for some sort of facelift of Husky Stadium. Cal has hired architects to launch the renovation and “seismic improvement” of Memorial Stadium, a course of action undertaken at gunpoint when coach Jeff Tedford began sniffing around for another job. At Stanford, trustees have approved the makeover of the kindling pile that is Stanford Stadium – beginning with the removal of 30,000 seats that haven’t felt the touch of a tush since the last time the joint hosted a Super Bowl.

But the Reser expansion is probably the biggest punch to the gut of the Cougars, because it makes Martin Stadium easily the smallest facility in the conference – by about 8,000 seats. The symbolism of getting swamped in the wake is a bit unsettling for any Coug, though Sterk didn’t take it that way, exactly.

“Getting our project going isn’t urgent per se because they finished theirs,” he said. “Ours is an urgency because we need it to build our revenue to be able to be competitive in the Pac-10.

“Oregon State and ourselves are kindred spirits in that standpoint. Them being able to get their project done is a good thing, because it does show our people that we can do something like that – and that we need to.”

There’s that concept again.

Sterk knows what the skeptics are thinking. Even now, when the Cougs fill Martin to 99 percent of capacity on game days, the ticket-and-customer relationship at Wazzu isn’t so much a matter of supply and demand as it is supply and maybe-I’ll-go-if-nothing- else-is-going-on.

To the people who see seats – good seats – available, this is just another aspect of that infernal arms race, like that indoor practice bubble the football team so seldom uses but had to have just because Oregon, UW and OSU had built bigger, more expensive practice barns that are probably used just as infrequently.

“People are talking ‘arms race,’ ” Sterk said, “but I was thinking about this the other day. Scholarships have gone up in my five years here close to $1.5 million. The state has shifted support for tuition to the public, and we in turn are having to pay that increase in our own scholarship bills.

“It’s not an athletic department getting greedy or envious. It’s the necessity of driving revenue to pay for those increased costs.”

This is why the Cougars aren’t focused so much on expansion – though they will add somewhere between 2,200 and 7,000 seats, Sterk said – as on premium areas: suites, club seating, loge boxes. They’re guessing that if an alum will invest a 10-hour round trip from the West Side to come to a game, he’ll invest a few more dollars in a premium seat with access to catered snacks and a TV with the USC game on.

The Cougs are taking their time with the initial stages because they’ll only get one chance to do it right, but also because they’ve already discovered some glitches. Initially, the upgrades were planned for the south side, but Sterk said that because of existing structures there, such as the IT building, add-ons were problematic. They’re now looking at the north – the student side – but not necessarily a second deck but “a building behind it, perhaps like Arizona did,” Sterk said, on giant columns to accommodate the premium seats.

Nothing is simple at Wazzu. One of the charming aspects of Martin Stadium – its snug fit into the campus core – is also a hitch in improving it. Likewise, the fund-raising that will have to be done for a project that doesn’t have a final price tag yet will be a challenge – though not necessarily the ultimate one.

That will be the same as it’s always been: packing the house.

Sure, better fan flow might help. More bathrooms. Foo-foo amenities and clubby interiors. But even when those are in place, there will still be barely a thousand motel beds in Pullman and Moscow, the closest metropolitan center will remain 90 minutes away, and the bulk of the alumni will still live on the other side of Snoqualmie Pass.

At Martin Stadium, home-field advantage will always be the most relative of terms.