Inside Texas Tech's plan to purchase, pay off new football facilities

The Texas Tech football program released a 10-minute video Tuesday in which associate athletics director Antonio Huffman provided a first virtual tour of what all's inside the Dustin R. Womble Football Center and the Jones AT&T Stadium south end zone building.

Tech announced plans for the massive project in July 2022, opened the south end zone building at the beginning of the 2024 season and completed the Womble Football Center this winter.

Over the next month, Tech athletics plans to acquire the property from the Red Raider Facilities Foundation that's been overseeing the project and structure a payment plan of more than $200 million over 30 years, Tech athletics executive staff members Jonathan Botros and Lacy Needham said in mid-February.

"Some of that, of course, will be repaid by gifts that continue to come in from pledges," Botros said, "so if somebody did a five-year pledge or a three-year pledge and they started it last year, their initial pledge payments would have gone to Red Raider Facilities Foundation, but once Texas Tech purchases the property back, the remaining pledge payments will go to Texas Tech and we'll use that to pay back commercial paper."

Tech initially announced the project as a $200 million undertaking. That grew to $242 million as additional components were added.

Tech's initial fundraising goal consisted of private gifts and pledges of at least $100 million. The project actually commenced, with the removal of the Masked Rider statue and the original Double T scoreboard from the south end zone after the 2022 season, with $81 million in commitments. The total of gifts and pledges now is a little less than $116 million, said Needham, the Tech senior associate athletics director and chief financial officer.

Tech has planned to pay off the difference via a combination of philanthropic gifts, financing, game-day premium revenue generated by the south end zone and operating revenue on the annual budget.

The Texas Tech University System Board of Regents in the fall approved the issuance of additional bonds for multiple projects on campus, Botros said, including those involving football.

"They are in the process right now of working with outside advisers on the pricing of those bonds and plan to, I think, do the sale sometime in the month of March," Botros said, "so that the transfer of ownership would be somewhere around the end of March, beginning of April."

"We're still finalizing the debt," Needham said, "but there will be some commercial paper, short-term debt tied to gifts that will still be coming in for that project, and then long-term bond debt. The schedule right now that we're building out takes into account our existing debt so that we can keep our long-term bonded debt at a consistent range from year to year. So that will be very helpful for us in the future."

Tech currently has a little more than $60.5 million in total athletics related debt. It had a little more than $12.2 million in athletics facilities debt service, leasing and rental fees on the operating budget for fiscal year 2024 that ended in August. It paid down more than $23 million in athletics facilities debt service in fiscal 2023 with an eye toward taking on the new debt for the football projects.

Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt has indicated he's comfortable with the debt level as the department pivots toward revenue sharing with athletes as the new priority. If the House v. NCAA settlement proposal receives final approval in April, schools can begin directly paying athletes a little more than $20 million annually.

"We will continue to keep our facilities updated and modern and fresh, cutting edge for recruiting and competition and training," Hocutt said, "but our focused fundraising is going to be this new (revenue-sharing) model."