According to Georgia athletic director Greg McGarity, the Bulldogs new indoor practice facility is going to cost the school around $30 million dollars. If you talk to Mark Richt, that's going to be money well spent because Georgia is the lone remaining SEC program to begin construction on an indoor facility.
"We are the last SEC team to build an indoor, but we'll have the best one because the ones that were built ten years ago, a lot of them are outdated, and a lot of them made a lot of mistakes." Richt explained on his summer speaking tour.
It's crazy to think that facilities that went up a decade ago are already starting to be viewed as "outdated," but that's the way the facilities arms race is now in college football.
"We were able to go a lot of places that have an indoor facility, and every one of them is like 'If we had to do it over again we'd have done this, or we'd have done that, or this so now - with all that knowledge - we'll be able to build thee state of the art facility in America. It's going to be beautiful."
Richt went on to note that they could have had the facility sooner, but the administration wanted to put it out by the soccer fields and that would have required the program to continue to bus players to practice and drop them off, and pick them up. Richt wanted the facility closer, so he convinced everyone to wait until they were "more serious about getting it done". Now the facility will be just a short walk away from the current practice facility and locker rooms.
By the way, Florida is putting up a new indoor facility for nearly half the price tag, so perhaps Richt is on to something about having the biggest and best one in the league as soon as the architects sign off on some things.