and guest experience feeds recruiting and vice versa.
100% agree. Anytime they tell the public something that cant happen, like train tunnels, it just sounds like they dont feel like it.
Plus when they do make improvements they are very poorly planned out. The best face of Ross Aide faces apartments/no one can see it. I personally dont think Mackey even looks good. The most serene entrance to the stadium, imo anyway, is up the stairs between the locker room and indoor facility and that area cant accomate many people/stairs are prohibitive to handicapped/old people. The coolest entrance to Mackey isnt front and center/also cant accomodate a ton of people. Short-sighted losers with no vision
I agree - there is just not a lot of creativity. Granted, that part of campus doesn't have a lot of space to work with, but it doesn't always seem very well thought out. It goes across several projects…
1. Ross-Ade renovation. Didn't touch the south end zone - it was a dump then, it's a dump now. Why they put together that project and didn't do anything to the south end zone (or really with any plans to do anything) is beyond me. Meanwhile, they have these grand plans to add upper decks to bring capacity to 80,000 (which any sane person could tell you was not logical or realistic to ever fill on an even semi-regular basis).
2. Baseball Stadium - I still think they put way too much into this. If anything, do it in phases. And the fundraising done for this was minimal.
3. Mackey Project. This was mind-boggling. First off, a significant amount of the project had nothing to do with Mackey or Purdue Basketball. It was moving the grand prix track, building new practice football fields, new locker rooms for many sports, the baseball stadium, etc. all lumped into one project called "The Mackey Renovation". Not to mention they did a poor job of marketing it and explaining to people what was done (the page they used on Purdue's website was…lacking).
On top of this, it was more of a band-aid fix in terms of facilities. The sports performance is underground and doesn't look that big for all the sports (minus football) to use whenever they want. It's better than what it was, but if you're going to build something new, build it right. The IAF looks horrible and has like zero windows - home to our academic center?
Obviously all of this requires money. The Mackey Renovation was planned before the financial collapse, but the fundraising portion heavily came after which was not good and not really Purdue's fault. The downfall of the football program has had a huge negative impact on the athletic department's financials - even while the BTN money is exceeding what was expected. And it shows no signs of improving.
This is why recruiting is important. Even if we weren't kicking butt on the field, excitement about a program sells tickets. If we saw exciting improvements in recruiting, in an exciting and/or well run system, etc. - this leads to more interest. For example, attendance in Matt Painter's first season actually increased - even though it was a horrible season. But they busted their butts and played hard - and won some games they shouldn't have. Meanwhile, there was also some exciting stuff happening with the program with recruiting.