Heading south, you see off to the right what makes so many jealous: acres surrounded by lights, dotted with buildings and topped by an 80,000-seat football stadium filled to the brim every Saturday.

It’s what so many schools — including Kansas University — long for in the days of intense competition in college athletics.

Texas is the king.

Everything’s bigger and better in the Lone Star State, and football facilities at the University of Texas follow that pattern. Four full pages in UT’s massive media guide — with 27 photographs — are dedicated solely to the facilities at UT, with the headline “SIMPLY THE BEST” blazing in bold letters.

KU’s athletic department strives for such pride and currently is scrambling for funds — about $25 million total — to construct facilities behind the south end zone of Memorial Stadium. It will feature locker rooms, meeting rooms, a weight room and offices for the KU football team, with a full natural-surface practice field close by.

The proposed project’s intent is to upgrade the quality and centralize the location of KU football, cut down on travel time spent between Memorial Stadium and the team’s headquarters near Allen Fieldhouse and give KU a respectable place to entertain recruits — the future of KU football — on game days.

Currently, they’re rounded up in a tent.

“It would help with the overall perception of the program,” Mangino said. “That the University of Kansas is committed to football. I think recruits and high school coaches see that.”

Taking notes

When KU administrators accompany the school’s athletic teams on road trips throughout the school year, they’re not just there to take in a game. Their eyes are peeled, their mental notebooks filling up, their imaginations churning.

“We’re there to learn what other institutions have,” KU associate athletic director Jim Marchiony said, “and whether or not we can take from that to make ourselves better.”

A few members of the staff, including athletic director Lew Perkins, visited UT’s spacious athletic campus last winter while the men’s basketball team was playing the Longhorns.

For football, facilities don’t get much better than at Texas: the 80,082-seat Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium; the 20,000-square foot Dr. Nasser Al-Rashid Strength and Training Center just a short walk away; a practice facility just down the road, featuring two full-length outdoor football fields; and another indoor football field that was built in 2002 for a price of $4 million.

In an attempt to add seats and make Texas Memorial Stadium a football-only paradise, a 20,000-seat soccer/track-and-field complex — Mike A. Myers Stadium — was constructed next door, making every sport happy and wildly popular among the best recruits in the country.

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The track was taken out of Texas Stadium in 1999. Today, KU’s Memorial Stadium is the only football venue in the Big 12 that still has a track.

The current fund-raising for a football facility won’t include the removal of the track at Memorial Stadium, and Marchiony said such a plan hadn’t even been discussed yet. But the desire to catch up with other schools, along with the sub-par facilities forced upon a national power Jayhawk soccer team, may force a soccer/track-and-field stadium to be a possible long-term goal for KU before too much longer.

What’s coming

For now, the space behind Memorial Stadium’s south end zone at KU is empty. There is a four-story videoboard, completed in 1999, but behind it is a chain-link fence and a hill leading up to the enchanting Campanile.

Mangino envisions more in that bare space. He sees what Texas envisioned years ago, before the Longhorns built the Moncrief-Neuhaus Athletics Complex in Texas Stadium’s south end zone.

Inside Moncrief — thanks in part to a major addition built in 1998 — is a huge locker room, a training room, trophy room, players lounge, football academic center and a strength-and-conditioning area that doubled in size in the late ’90s, when UT’s athletic campus underwent a $90 million facelift.

Marchiony said KU wasn’t looking to imitate any school, be it Texas or Oklahoma or Nebraska. But he does admit that every place KU goes, administrators take notes to add to the collective brainstorm of what KU might like to see down the road on its campus.

“Every time we visit some place, we learn,” Marchiony said. “We may not necessarily want what school X has. It may be, we’d like a combination of what school X has and what school Y has.

“You can get better by assessing what you need, then looking at what other schools have and seeing how that can fit into what you need.”

KU has no blueprints for its football project just yet. Millions of dollars already have been pledged for the facility, but the bank-breaking donation has yet to emerge, and the athletic department has stated that the plans won’t move forward until all funding is secured.

Sources have told the Journal-World recently, though, that Tennessee Titans owner and KU benefactor Bud Adams may be the guy to put the plan into motion.

Until then, KU will keep its figurative fingers crossed and hope that help is on the way to assist putting KU back in the running for football success.

“I’ve got a great deal of faith in our administration here that they’re going to make this project a reality,” Mangino said. “Lew Perkins and John Hadl have worked tirelessly on it, and it’s going to happen. We just have to be patient.”