en increase during years when the football team performs well. Further, many football players who are drafted by the NFL often donate large sums of money to the athletic departments of their former colleges, like New York Giants quarterback Kerry Collins who, once he signed his NFL contract, donated $3 million to his old alma mater, Penn State University (Kerry 1).
Stadiums are often named for donors or past presidents, like Florida State’s Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee. Traditionally, the naming of college football stadiums is often connected to the individual who donated a majority of the funding to help construct and/or improve the stadium, former college football coaches, or former university presidents. For example, Byrd Stadium, the home of the Maryland Terrapins, is named after a former Maryland football player, coach and president “The stadium is named for Dr. H. C. Byrd, a multi-sport athlete as an undergraduate who later became head football coach and eventually served as university president” (Terp Marketplace 1). Obviously, funding is important to college football or donors would not be given such a considerable place of importance.
This analysis will focus on stadium financing in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). The Atlantic Coast Conference boasts nine teams: Florida State, Georgia Tech., Virginia, Clemson, Wake Forest, North Carolina State, Duke, Maryland, and North Carolina. The Southeast Conference boasts twelve teams, with six teams divided into two divisions, the East and the West: EAST (Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Vanderbilt, South Carolina); and WEST (Alabama, Mississippi State, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana State). As we will discuss later, membership in one conference versus another can also have an indirect impact on generating revenues from which stadium expansion funds are drawn.
After a separate discussion of performance f...