Gators planning massive renovation to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Ben Hill Griffin will be getting a facelift in the near future. The home of the Florida Gators will have “a couple hundred million” invested into renovations, according to Athletic Director Scott Stricklin.

“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 renovation to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium predates Stricklin’s tenure. Florida has done extensive research on the land that the stadium sits on, and the surrounding buildings to figure out what could potentially be done. The renovations aren’t imminent. There will need to be more considerable planning and even more fundraising for a project of this magnitude.

“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.”

Gators plan to renovate The Swamp in phases

The plan to renovate Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in phases is for several reasons. First, Florida and Stricklin don’t want construction to affect home games. Most of the UAA has offices inside the stadium. The weight room in the Swamp also is used by most of the teams on campus.

“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.”

“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.”

Ben Hill Griffin Stadium is an iconic venue in college football. Stricklin isn’t looking to change that, but he does want to modernize the Swamp.

“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.”