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The reborn Pac-12 added another school today, announcing Gonzaga will join Oregon State, Washington State, Boise State, San Diego State, Fresno State, Colorado State, and Utah State in what is now a Pac-8 but sometimes 7. That “sometimes 7” remains a problem. Conferences need eight football teams to be recognized by the NCAA at the FBS level. Gonzaga does not play football.
To solve this conundrum, the Pac-12 will most likely continue negotiations with Memphis, ask media consultants about Texas State, listen to the pitches of Sacramento State’s fledgling booster community, and initiate or continue a number of other initiatives. They’ll find the eighth team somewhere, because they have to, and with Gonzaga now in the fold, the league likely looks a lot more attractive to Memphis in particular than it did last week.
What if, though—and hear me out on this—the eighth football team was already in the conference? What if the eighth team was Gonzaga?
Starting a college football program is expensive. This is the primary hurdle to doing it. Wichita State ran a study on what it would cost Wichita State back in 2016, and they came back with a $75 million estimate. The price would differ for Gonzaga, but it would be an expensive project. Even if the general costs were the exact same, inflation would lift that number to $98 million today. They’d need practice facilities. They’d need equipment. They’d need administrative staff. They’d need a coaching staff. They’d need additional investments in women’s sports in order to meet Title IX requirements. They might even need to build a brand new stadium. The NCAA got rid of the minimum average attendance rule last year (schools used to have to “sell” 15,000 tickets per game), but the largest football-sized facility currently in Spokane—One Spokane Stadium—only seats five thousand fans. There was a bigger field there until a few years ago, but Joe Albi Stadium was demolished when One Spokane Stadium was built.
Beyond how expensive it would be to get the thing off the ground, there’s the added challenge of generating fan support. A large reason the Pac-12 fell apart in the first place was waning college football interest on the West Coast. Spokane is very much not Seattle, but some of the same cultural forces are at play, and there’s a reason every new Division I football program since the year 2000 has come from Texas, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, or South Carolina.
Still…it’s alluring, isn’t it? The premise of Gonzaga football is a tantalizing curiosity. What would it look like? Could it succeed?
If Gonzaga had the resources to get the program off the ground, it’s not outlandish to think it could sustain itself. Winning breeds winning, and Gonzaga knows how to run an athletic department. Fan engagement is a habit, and Gonzaga students can navigate a basketball schedule just fine. Enrollment is small, but it’s small at TCU, SMU, and Notre Dame. We’re not asking Gonzaga to win national championships. We’re asking them to build a competitive football program in a turbocharged Mountain West. They’ve done it with baseball, with women’s basketball, with cross country, and with rowing. Football is a different beast. But there are correlations.
The question is how to get—and keep—the resources. Let’s look a little deeper at how plausible it could be.
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We aren’t saying Gonzaga has one hundred million dollars lying around. They would have to generate a lot of money to make this happen. Can it be generated? That’s the question here, and we’re going to need a comparison. We could compare Gonzaga to Wichita State, or to Utah State, or to Wake Forest. Perhaps the most useful counterpart, though, is someone more local: Eastern Washington.
EWU exists in Cheney, Washington, twenty minutes from Gonzaga’s downtown Spokane location. Cheney isn’t exactly a suburb—you pass the airport and some open land on your way up there—but it’s very much local to Gonzaga, even more local than Washington State down in Pullman. Per its own reporting, its endowment totaled $32.1 million last year, and its annual university budget is roughly $237 million. Its enrollment is close to eleven thousand, but only about 7,500 of those students are undergrads.
Gonzaga’s numbers are different. Its enrollment is smaller—seven thousand in total, with roughly five thousand undergrads. Its budget is larger—$418.6 million in 2023. Its endowment is much, much bigger than EWU’s, reported at $413.7 million last year. What does all of this mean? The endowment means Gonzaga has enjoyed more historic support than directional state school EWU, pointing back at how big of donors each school has ever had. The budget means Gonzaga has more resources available on an annual basis, pointing towards what sort of donors Gonzaga has (EWU being public adds a significant wrinkle here). The enrollment doesn’t mean a whole lot—sometimes, enrollments can point towards the total quantity of alumni engagement, but alumni who lived on campus tend to stay more engaged with a school, and EWU has more prototypical commuter students than Gonzaga. The numbers are similar enough there to disregard them.
Why are we comparing Gonzaga to EWU, besides their proximity to one another?
Because Eastern Washington is currently seeking $13 million in pledged donations in order to help finance a $25M renovation to Roos Field, their famous red-turfed football stadium.
Let’s talk about Roos Field. We mentioned One Spokane Stadium earlier, and how small it is. Roos Field is bigger. It’s almost twice as big. If One Spokane Stadium is just too small, or if it isn’t an option because of the stadium’s other commitments, it’s not inconceivable that Gonzaga could ask Eastern Washington to rent Roos Field for football home games, at least for a few years. The situation wouldn’t be ideal for the Zags. They’d be playing at a small venue twenty minutes out of town on a distinctive surface that is not their own. Scheduling would be complicated, though networks do love a Friday night TV slot on the West Coast. Again, though, it’s alluring. A major piece of the estimated $75M price tag at Wichita State—roughly a third of that estimate—was assigned to necessary stadium preparations. Take the stadium out of the equation and the 2016 price tag on creating an FBS football program drops to $50M, or $65M today. Sharing a stadium with Eastern Washington—and perhaps sharing some of that $13M in addition to a scheduling agreement and some free advertising for EWU—could lower the cost of launching football by roughly 30%.
What’s more interesting about the $13M, though, and the reason we make the comparison, is that EWU evidently thinks it has a chance of raising that much money. If EWU thinks it can raise $13M and Gonzaga is spending 77% more than EWU every year, with an endowment 13 times bigger, is there any chance Gonzaga could raise $70M or $100M to start playing football? Aside from alumni, the two do draw from some of the same local business leaders.
The answer is probably no. We’re trying our best, but the answer is probably no. Football brings a lot out of people—Notre Dame famously tried to build new facilities for its psychology department for thirty years, only to finally raise the necessary funds in one afternoon by attaching those facilities to the football stadium—but for a school with no football culture, in a part of the country not kind to college football, at a time when the university budget is shrinking…it doesn’t make sense. I wish it did, because it would be fascinating to watch, but unless Wichita State’s study was far, far, far too conservative, it’s just really hard to believe that Gonzaga can access that kind of money. 77% more than a $13M goal is only $23M, and we’re looking at something like $65M, minimum, again unless that Wichita State study was a mess.
Still…maybe they should try?
A lot of small colleges are short on money right now. This is specifically true of small Catholic colleges on the West Coast. The conventional wisdom in a situation like this is to cut costs, redefine mission, and get through the storm. What if it’s not a storm, though? What if it’s a new normal? Conventional wisdom is sometimes wise, but it’s often cautious. Does Gonzaga need caution, or would it be better-served exploring the possibility of trying something big? Football is an expensive business. But that’s because it can mean so much to a school.
At the very least, I hope Gonzaga’s pulsing its biggest boosters and pulsing the city of Spokane. I hope it’s looking into the possibility of football at One Spokane Stadium, and, if that’s not feasible, exploring the option of a few seasons out in Cheney. Gonzaga already made the leap out of the WCC. Why not at least take a peek at the size of the next jump?
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