A Conversation With ... Patrick Ransdell

You’ve come at a monumental time for the university with the transition to Conference USA that will happen in July. What’s the groundwork you’re working on right now and what’s still to come?
We are all in on preparing for next fall. We’re doing a lot of work out at Plaster [Stadium] this spring just to prepare ourselves so that we can be ready. There’s probably a lot of work that happens underground, so to speak. There’s a lot of fiber and ESPN items that need to be checked off the list. We got the new field going in this spring. And we’re replacing the lights. A lot of that stuff had to be done for us to make this transition, because ESPN has standards that we need to make sure that we’re meeting. We’re going through our budget process right now and we should have a better idea of what that’s going to look like come May. Conference USA is going to be a lot more travel than what we’re used to. When you have to go to Delaware, Miami, New Mexico State, there’s just a lot of places across the East and South/Southwest area that we’re going to be traveling to. There’s a budgetary issue with that, obviously things are going to be a little bit higher.

Former President Clif Smart had estimated a $5 million annual increase to join Conference USA, adding to about a $31 million athletics budget. Is that still where you think that will land?
That’s a relatively realistic number. We’ve got some things going on with the institution to make sure that we’re able to do everything that we need to do. So, between a $5 million, $6 million increase is probably going to be reasonable.

Your first year of those costs, the fiber, lights and getting ready for ESPN, there was an outside donation to cover that. So unless Tom Strong wants to donate $5 million again, that will be on the university to handle. What are you looking at to try to cover that in your costs?
I think there’s a lot more opportunity from a corporate standpoint that we can do maybe that we haven’t done in the past. The NCAA has eased back on allowing institutions more flexibility with putting logos on fields. Eventually a jersey patch is coming. I would be surprised if that didn’t happen sometime in the next few years. Springfield has a robust corporate community, especially for a city of its size. We need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of that and putting our best foot forward and generating funds necessary because, you’re right, we need to do a better job of generating our self-revenue, ticket sales, corporate sales, donations.

With those conversations you’re having with corporate partners, what do they want out of sponsorships?
The great thing is we’ve got a really good ESPN contract with Conference USA, so they’re going to get more national eyeballs along with we’re going to be able to increase our ESPN+ platform significantly in Conference USA. At the end of the day, our season ticket sales, they’ve got to increase. Especially for all these local corporations, if they’re going to spend their money, they want to make sure that eyeballs are seeing them and they’re getting a good ROI on their investment. We’ve already gone on sale with football season tickets. Right now, we’ve almost doubled our season ticket revenue from last year and it’s March.

You had a sluggish men’s basketball season as it relates to attendance. You had some good games with football as it relates to attendance. Now you’ve doubled season ticket revenue for football so far for next season. Do you attribute that all to the Conference USA change or are there other strategies that the team is implementing?
We just hired a new associate athletic director for external affairs, and she’s already hit the ground running, trying to come up with stuff for next fall. But certainly hosting (Southern Methodist University) in football next fall is a big deal. That is a driver. I think Conference USA is a driver. The fact that we’re moving up to FBS and committing to a good football program, I think has galvanized some people in the community. Basketball obviously was a challenge this year. I’m not sure if I’ve seen our basketball coaches since the end of the season because they’ve been on the road recruiting, which is exactly where they need to be. Every time I went to a game this year and let’s just say there were 3,000 people in the stands, I looked at that as there were 6,000 or 7,000 opportunities there that were empty. Not only for revenue, but for also our atmosphere. And then we’re going to have to do a better job with our students. I think we can have a lot better student attendance at all of our venues, but especially men’s basketball and football, than we had in the past. That’s going to take a little bit more investment on our part to make sure that we provide an environment that’s worthy of them coming back to every game.

Men’s basketball finished last in the Missouri Valley Conference. This was of course Cuonzo Martin’s first year back at MSU. You talk about the recruiting efforts, but what needs to happen to get the men’s basketball team on a much different path?
If you turn back the clock to last April when we hired coach, he basically had to reconstruct an entire team, because we had two holdovers from last year. So, you’re trying to go out and recruit 13 to 15 new guys in a span of about 30 to 45 days before summer workout starts. It’s almost like that was year zero, and this year coming up is almost year one because now they’ve had an entire year to recruit, an entire year to create relationships. I think you’re going to see that pay off judging by the conversations that I know that they’re having. Basketball is a sport that you can turn fairly quickly. But then it’s going to be on us to make sure that they want to stay here and provide them an experience where they don’t want to transfer, that they feel a love from our crowd and we’re getting good crowds.

A year from now, what will success look like?
We want to be competitive in every sport we field and compete for championships. Is it realistic to expect a Conference USA championship next year? That’s probably a bit aggressive, but I do think that we can step in and be competitive. Having our crowd, I think, and that atmosphere be able to push us over the edge maybe in some of those closer games – we had a lot of games decided by less than five or six points this year. If we can go out and get the right guys in here, and I think that we can flip those games and come out on the other side of them and be able to compete in Conference USA off the bat. I think that’s a realistic goal is to try and finish upper half of Conference USA and be competitive for a championship.

President Williams has said maybe $100 million is needed to update Plaster Stadium. What’s the timeline?
We’re going to gauge that in years because it’s going to take a lot of fundraising, and we’ve already started that process. I would expect that you will see a phased approach to Plaster Stadium. One of our big issues is we have some limitations on our debt capacity, which makes it a little bit more challenging because we need to work on a cash basis. We’re working with architects now on trying to at least have a better understanding of maybe how many phases we can do, what the cost of each one of those phases would be. I do think over the next decade you will see an investment level of that magnitude.