Florida planning one of most ambitious stadium upgrades in SEC history

The University of Florida is planning massive upgrades to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, with athletics director Scott Stricklin noting the Florida facilities update will be one of the most ambitious in the history of the Southeastern Conference.

Florida will be looking to sink “a few hundred million dollars” into the project all told.

“That is going to be by far the most ambitious facility project not only the University of Florida has ever done from an athletic standpoint but it might be the biggest in SEC history, maybe even as big as any nationally,” Stricklin said Monday on Sportscene with Steve Russell. “It’s going to be, my guess is to fully renovate the Swamp you’re looking at a few hundred million dollars.”

The program just recently completed an $85 million football facility that brought the Florida facilities more in line with its national peers.

The Gators aren’t planning to stop on the facilities front any time soon, though the next phase will take considerable planning… and fundraising.

“That takes a lot of planning and a lot of careful thought,” Stricklin said. “We’ve done two separate studies, a kind of initial renovation study. We’ve dug in a little bit more. We just wrapped up a second study, and it’s perfect timing now because with president (Ben) Sasse here on campus, get him involved in that conversation.

“Then we’ve got to figure out how you finance something that is that significant, because this is — it’s not going to be a new coat of paint and a couple new video boards. It’s going to be all of that plus significant structural renovations. Really what you want to do is you want to make sure Ben Hill Griffin Stadium extends its useful life for several generations. Not a 10- or 15-year fix but a 75-year fix.”

A project that will happen in phases

One thing Stricklin stressed in talking with Russell was that a project this big will likely happen with some incremental progress.

An upgrade to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium will have a ton of different layers, some of them very practical for sports teams that use some of the existing facilities. Like a weight room in the south end zone of the stadium.

“We need, right now a lot of our Olympic sports are using the (weight room) in Ben Hill Griffin,” Stricklin said. “We would need an Olympic sport weight room. So there’s projects like that that are going to be tied in some way to what we do at the Swamp.”

Office space will also have to be reconfigured eventually.

“We have 180,000 square foot of office space housed in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium,” Stricklin said. “he UAA uses about half of it, the university uses the other half. Some of those spaces, our hope is to repurpose them for gameday usages. So there’s alot of tethers to that as you start looking at a facility that is that large, that comprehensive and has the age on it that it does there’s a lot of moving parts.

“There’s some things I hope we can do early on to kind of kick-start it whether it’s video boards or lights or audio things just to kind of get the ball rolling.”

The upgrade to Ben Hill Griffin will be massive

Whenever the ball gets rolling officially on the next phase of Florida’s facilities renovations it’s clear the goal is the think big.

Outside of a west concourse renovation that modernized the look and introduced some upgraded concessions stands, there hasn’t been a whole lot of work to the stadium done in the last decade or so.

That will change whenever Florida officially unveils its new plans.

“We have a pretty comprehensive long-term vision of what we want that to be,” Stricklin said, “And we want it to be the iconic football stadium that everybody thinks of that’s better than ever and is going to be around for a long, long time.”