That much was clear to me Friday after catching up with Jacksonville president Mark Lamping, a few days after plans were unveiled to gut TIAA Bank Stadium and essentially put a new venue in its place for between $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion. And it was most clear when I asked Lamping straight up whether the future of the team in North Florida is tied to the fate of this project.
He’s optimistic, to be sure, that the Jaguars will land the funding they need to go forward with what they’ve spent nearly seven years working on. But the truth is, they have to be.
“What we said, Albert, is we cannot extend our lease in Jacksonville without a solution to the current stadium,” Lamping says. “And we’ve been pretty direct with that. That was the premise when we first started talking about this in 2016. We focused on those cities that have found themselves in bad situations and wanted to do everything we can to avoid that. Whether you look at St. Louis, Oakland, San Diego, all those situations had several things in common.
“They were generally smaller markets, [and] they had aging stadiums without a stadium solution. And the team was not compelled by any lease to have to stay in that market. Unfortunately for the NFL fans in those communities, they lost their team. That’s not any type of situation that we want the fans in northeast Florida to endure. It was because of that, that we tried to get so far ahead of this.”
They got ahead of it by researching both the idea of building a new venue and renovating the current one. They got ahead of it by doing exhaustive engineering studies. They got ahead of it by working with fans, and with national governing bodies that control big events, and with the universities of Florida and Georgia (who play their rivalry game in the stadium) to troubleshooting any and all blueprints they laid out for the future.
And they came to a bunch of conclusions.
• The old Gator Bowl could sustain a second overhaul—after being reconstructed to house the Jags in the first place in the mid-1990s. “The first renovation was essentially a new build,” Lamping says. “We only kept one side of the stadium. And then the super structure that they put in beneath the current version of the stadium that was done in the mid-’90s, it was well thought out, it’s structurally sound and its useful life can be extended. What can’t be extended is everything that’s attached to that super structure system. And that’s our approach. It’s more of a gut rehab than a renovation. We think we’ll end up with essentially all the benefits of a new stadium and we’ll be able to do it at a significantly lower cost.”
• What does significantly lower cost mean? It means saving a billion—the cost Lamping and his team were looking at for a new stadium in Jacksonville would be $2.4 billion.
• Public money would have to be incorporated. And Lamping says this having come to Jacksonville from a job as CEO of the privately financed venue, MetLife Stadium, that houses the Jets and Giants. “We watched very closely what was happening not only in Buffalo but what happened in Nashville, what has happened in Baltimore, what happened in New Orleans—all of those are comparable markets. It’s amazingly consistent what you see, that in the bottom quartile of NFL market teams, the arrangement for stadium construction involves a hefty investment from the public sector,” Lamping says before conceding, “That’s not the case in the big markets. I was up in New York before I came down to Jacksonville, and with MetLife Stadium, there wasn’t a significant public involvement in that project.”
• That public contribution to the stadium the Jags are looking for would pay for more than half the bill. But, Lamping says, “We’ve done partnerships with the city of Jacksonville; we’re doing one right now with our practice facility. We did one with the music venue we built. Those have worked really well and they’ve been 50-50 cost-shared. What the framework of this agreement is, there’s a bigger project, which includes the stadium and the development outside the stadium, that be 50-50.”
• If funding is secured, moving out of the stadium for a couple of years while the work is being done is the most cost-effective way of managing the project. In that scenario, the Jags would be out of the stadium in 2026 and ’27, and back in the rebuilt structure in ’28. If the Jags try to play in the stadium through the construction, it’ll impact four seasons, rather than two, and add about $200 million to the total cost, according to Lamping (we’ll have more on the temporary sites in our next takeaway).
• And, yes, SoFi Stadium is the inspiration for a lot of the drawings you’ve seen. Or at least part of it. “Yeah, the inspiration for SoFi is more related to the roof structure,” Lamping says. “SoFi is an open-air stadium that has a permanent roof covering the seats and the field. And that works in the Southern California climate. It’ll also work in northeast Florida. So if they’re just comparisons, that’s the biggest comparison. We have a roof, a permanent roof over the stadium that provides shade on all the seats, it provides protection from the rain, it provides protection in severe weather conditions that we get occasionally in Northeast Florida. But it’s open air.” And, yes, they’re keeping the pools. Also, Lamping describes the exterior of the stadium’s PFTE fabric, which is what wraps around the structure in the renderings, will almost be like looking out a set of mirrored sunglasses from inside.
Of course, that’s assuming the stadium gets built, and obviously there are still a few hoops for the NFL and the Jaguars to jump through on this one.
During our conversation early Friday morning, Lamping raised the possibility to me, and there’s no question that, without knowing whether it would work, the idea of having NFL games at an iconic race track was a little more fun than putting them in Gainesville or Orlando.
“They have had football down there,” Lamping says. “The University of Tennessee played at Bristol [Motor Speedway]. And keep in mind, that facility is probably the closest of those three facilities to Jacksonville. From where I live, it’s 60 miles down to Daytona. And they’re used to handling crowds of over 100,000. So the traffic and the parking and all of that, they handle in a major way twice a year with their two NASCAR races.
“So they’re going to be interesting.”
Now, Lamping said the Jaguars have already shared with officials in Gainesville (Florida Field) and Orlando (Camping World Stadium) what the NFL would require for them to host games, and they aren’t that far down the road with Daytona. That said, Lamping says he has “had discussions, but I haven’t met with the speedway yet. That’s on the books for the next week or two.”
Still, Orlando and Gainesville would probably be the most practical temporary homes, with those two needing only some to get to broadcast requirements the NFL has for its games (lighting upgrades could be one), and being turnkey otherwise. Listening to Lamping, it seems a little less likely that the team will choose one of its in-town options.
“We’ve looked at two temporary solutions in Jacksonville,” he says. “There’s a Triple A baseball stadium we could add 20,000 seats to. There’s a track and field stadium at the University of North Florida we could add 20,000 seats to. That’d get us to a capacity of 30,000, which would be very similar to what the Chargers did when they were waiting for SoFi.”
The problem, in both those cases, would be that it’d probably cost around $125 million to get those venues to NFL code, which would go against the team’s efforts to keep spending on the overarching project.
