Rundown of Nebraska AD Troy Dannen, who talks Memorial Stadium project and more

Nebraska athletic director Troy Dannen spoke with local media inside Hawks Championship Center on Friday.

Since Dannen didn’t attend Big Ten Media Days in Las Vegas, Dannen wanted to provide a Q&A in Lincoln before the fall season kicks off. Dannen called it a “state of the state.”

> Dannen said there was a school-record 3.46 GPA among Nebraska student-athletes. There were 11 more academic All-Americans than last year.

“Nobody talks about academics anymore, but internally, we talk about academics all the time,” Dannen said. “So everybody’s very proud of that.

> Dannen said Nebraska athletics set a record with 17,663 donors.

“We also passed $70 million in donations last year for the first time, another Nebraska record,” Dannen said. “So Tyler Kai (Deputy AD – Revenue Generation) and his crew did a remarkable job.”

> In athletic departments, there’s what Dannen called the “women’s four” — the core four women’s sports, which include volleyball, softball, basketball and soccer. Dannen said Nebraska’s attendance for those four sports last year was 337,000 — it ranked second in the country. Only South Carolina was ahead of Nebraska, with LSU coming in third.

“If you expand it to include men’s basketball, baseball and football — the seven ticketed sports — we were at 1.3 million. That’s seventh in the country, second in the Big Ten, behind Ohio State,” Dannen said. “I think for the schools above us were 100,000-seat football stadiums. So 1.3 million in a state with a population of $2 million is really remarkable. Just a credit to the fans.”

> Aramark has invested about $7 million in capital inside the stadium, like kitchens and different ways to distribute concessions in hopes of enhancing fan experience. There’s also a new north scoreboard, and Verizon has made a $20 million investment in cellular service in the stadium.

“No promises that everybody’s going to be able to stream other games when they walk in, like they would if they were at home on their WiFi,” Dannen said. “WiFi will be a part of the stadium project eventually. We’re not doing WiFi until the stadium project is done, but we expect this to be a huge upgrade for the fan experience.”

> There will be fully mobile ticketing in Memorial Stadium, as well as a no re-entry policy. Dannen said he understands there will be fan consternation with the no re-entry policy, but with alcohol being served, security and making sure the stadium is safe for families is a top priority. Dannen said there will be between 100-110 police officers at home football games. Last year, there were 75 police officers for a home football game.

“While we’re in a place where security sometimes is an afterthought, I don’t think in this day and age we can do anything less than best practice,” Dannen said, “and anything less than have a secure and safe environment as to the extent that we can do.”

> The new track facility is “progressing well,” Dannen said, and should be completed by mid-fall. The new facility will seat 2,500 fans.

> Dannen said the athletic department is moving forward with plans to expand John Cook Arena. When the winter sports season is over, the plywood behind the benches will be taken out with new seats installed. Dannen expects Cook Arena to hold 10,200 fans, and there will be seat backs in the lower bowl everywhere except one end, where the student section will be.

> With Nebraska now living in the revenue-sharing era, Dannen said he wants to start taking advantage of his facilities to create more revenue. He wants Memorial Stadium to host more shows and concerts, for example.

To achieve this, Dannen has created an events group.

“We have to start thinking entrepreneurially. The days are past when we can just rely on, ‘Hey, there’s seven home football games and we’re going to shutter the stadium.’ We have to find ways to generate revenue,” Dannen said. “And I know everybody’s tired of hearing about it, but we have to generate revenue outside of raising ticket prices, and one of the ways to do it are capitalizing the venues. One, it’s also great for the community. It’s heads in beds. But we have to start thinking heads and beds and we have to start thinking and acting like we’re a Convention Visitors Bureau. We can’t be passive any longer and say, ‘I hope somebody calls us and wants to perform in our stadium.’ So the idea of this events group is to actively pursue events.”

Dannen said Nebraska is currently engaged in talks with three different events that, if finalized, would happen in 2026.

> As for the Memorial Stadium renovation project, Dannen said it’s “status quo” right now.

“In a normal time, a stadium project like this, all of this work would be done without anyone knowing we’re doing it. But the fact that the project was out there in the public, approved to some degree in planning by the board, I think everybody’s waited for the next step,” Dannen said.

“We’re continuing basically looking at east, west, north and south in totality. This this week, the chancellor sent a note out talking about the structural deficit at the university. The President spoke about some of the system-wide financial issues. There’s going to be a lot of trauma ahead.

“We’re not going to take anything (renovation plans) to the Board for their approval, and I don’t know when we will. But the time is not now in the midst of what I would almost level some degree of crisis on campus — consternation at the very least, crisis at the very most.

“Now is not the time to debut a big capital project, but we’re going to continue to work on the plans. We’re going to continue to fine tune the financial model. And at whatever point in time I think we can comfortably take it back, we’ll take it back. But otherwise, I would just say status quo.”

> Dannen said Nebraska is paying the House Settlement-mandated $20.5 million to its athletes this year. To help get the $20.5 million, Nebraska used some of its Big Ten distribution.

“Tom Osborne is going to get credit for a lot of things. He’ll never get enough credit for bringing us to the Big Ten,” Dannen said.

Nebraska’s athletic department also reduced its operating expenses by eliminating 27 positions, which created an additional $2-3 million. Dannen said he expects $5 million from alcohol sales.

Four sports — football, men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball — are allocated a cash pool from that $20.5 million. Dannen chose not to go into specifics regarding how much money each of those sports is getting.

“I’m not going to talk about the numbers, and I don’t think anybody in the country is talking about the numbers that’s going sport by sport,” Dannen said. “I don’t think anything’s out of probably whack with what happens in most places. When the coaches get that pool of money, they decide who gets what and how much, whether it’s one-year, two-year, whatever the contract terms are with the individual athletes.”

With revenue sharing and NIL now a part of life in college athletics, Dannen said General Managers are a need. Pat Stewart is Matt Rhule’s GM while Luca Virgilio is Fred Hoiberg’s GM.

“That’s why coaches, everybody’s moved to the GMs, because there is now a strategy in how are we, where are we allocating those resources,” Dannen said. “Not to mention the fact that nearly every athlete has an agent, and the head football coach cannot be expected to deal with 80 agents, and that’s the role of the general manager right now.”

> Dannen said his No. 1 priority is protecting the financial model he walked into when he was hired about 18 months ago.

“That financial model is this: we don’t take any student fees, we don’t take any institutional subsidies, we don’t take any state dollars,” Dannen said. “We pull pay full rate for scholarships. There’s no out of state differential waivers, and we pay the last two years, and this year again, $5 million back to the university as a subsidy.

“That financial model has to be protected at all costs. It’s that financial model that allowed us to do essentially nothing draconian to get to the $20.5, and that $20.5 is growing 4% a year. That cost is going to continue. It allowed us to not raise ticket prices. It allowed us to not reduce the subsidy. It allowed us to keep budgets whole through the 24-sport lineup. That financial model is the fuse that’s going to light whatever success we have. And so I will tell you, we will protect it at all cost.”

How important is a football program that wins to Nebraska’s financial model?

“You can argue the last 20 years, football maybe hasn’t won at that level, and the financial model still works. I do not think that is infinite. We have to win,” Dannen said. “And if you’re doing this to not win, if you’re not in it to win it, get out. And we’ve invested a lot of resources in football in the last couple of years, investing resources not to compete where we were, but to compete where we expect to be. We’ve done it in personnel. We’ve done it in infrastructure. We’ve done it in every way we can. Football needs to win.”

> Like Rhule did at Big Ten Media Days in Las Vegas, Dannen gave a shout out to Tom and Shawn Peed, the key financial backers of 1890.

“They’ve done everything we’ve asked and we’ve needed. Whatever position or whatever trajectory that Matt’s been able to take football in particular has been because of what the collective has allowed us to do, as we’ve talked through with the collective,” Dannen said. “What do these new rules mean? Their message to me is, tell us what you need us to be, and that is what we will be. The days of the collective collecting cash and distributing it as if it’s NIL, but it’s pay for play? Those days are gone. The (House_ settlement stop that.”

> NIL Go is the official clearinghouse for NCAA D1 student-athletes to report third-party NIL deals. Dannen said there have been 39 NIL deals submitted by Nebraska athletes. Twenty have already been approved while four recently went in to be looked at. Those deals have ranged from $600 to $40,000. Dannen said he thinks three NIL deals have been over $35,000.

“It’s up to the athlete to submit the deals, so that number will continue to grow,” Dannen said. “There’s 15 deals where there’s been no decision. We haven’t had any deals rejected, but there are 15 sitting there awaiting a response. All 15 are deals between collectives and student athletes, and that probably is tied into the the kind of back and forth over what the what collectives are going to be able to do, and what they weren’t going to be able to do. So we’re expecting some answers. Most of those deals are small, under $10,000 of value.”

> Dannen said he’s been told about 66,000 tickets have been sold for Nebraska’s season-opener against Cincinnati at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.

“Near as we can tell, about 6,000 of those were what I would call Ohio, Kentucky-type, Cincinnati addresses. It’s kind of what we’ve been told,” Dannen said. “That doesn’t mean it’s 60,000 versus 6,000 but, I said it yesterday, it’s a virtual home game. We think we’re about 60, and I think they expect to sell out before game day.”