For most of this year, FS Investors has had one monumental advantage over San Diego State University in its effort to whip up support for its Mission Valley stadium and development project. It had its shit together. It had a plan, a vision and some pretty pictures to sell.
SDSU, caught flat-footed when negotiations went sideways (feel free to assign blame as your bias dictates), had what amounted to an IOU scribbled on a placemat from Denny’s Den.
That finally changed today.
Goodbye SDSU West renderings, hello SDSU Mission Valley Campus renderings:
It would be premature to call Wednesday’s rollout a turning point in the never-ending Battle For Mission Valley that will consume us all. But at the very least, the two combatants will now fight on equal footing as they lob incendiary hashtags and accusations at one another for the next several horrible and annoying months.
You can go through all the details yourself, but here are some of what I think are the key points.
- The plan calls for a 35,000 seat football stadium that is soccer-friendly and expandable for NFL (lol that’s not happening, you know that right?). It would be located in the northwest corner of the current lot near Friar’s Road. From the teensy glimpse they offered today, it kinda looks like Colorado State’s new stadium, which makes sense considering SDSU has hired the same architect.
- Clearly, our days of parking/drinking plastic jug vodka on a sea of asphalt are numbered. Game traffic would park underground or in structures, though it appears they’ve set aside a rec field for “tailgating.”
- The site itself lays out like so between stadium, campus, retail and parkland. I wouldn’t have necessarily gone with the “pile of jellybeans” motif for this slide but whatever.
- The plan has a roundabout that plays tribute to the Illuminati maybe? Mysterious!
- Here’s the Hubble Telescope timeline and funding they’re talking about.
But don’t come down from your renderings high just yet, friends! We’ll have more football-specific pretty pictures to gawk at tomorrow after athletics has its stadium announcement out at SDCCU.
Hopefully they’ll have more information about the obelisk, too. What does it mean? What horrible deeds might it will me to do?
HAIL OBELISK.
KABEER THIRTY 