Rutgers’ Pat Hobbs shares update on indoor football practice facility, timeline for master plan reveal

On the day Rutgers announced major facilities news, it revealed that it is making progress on other big projects in that space.
The athletic department hopes to release plans for the long-discussed indoor practice facility for the football program, as well as the facilities master plan it commissioned in 2020, at some point this fall, Athletic Director Pat Hobbs said Monday.
It matches comments from head coach Greg Schiano last week at Big Ten Media Days, where he told NJ Advance Media that the school will be “getting into a timeline soon” with the football facility.
“Working on it,” Hobbs said. “That’s a very important facility for coach and for the team and for Rutgers University. We’re doing some tweaks to it. We hope in the fall to really come out with what the plans are.”
During their negotiations with Schiano in November 2019, Rutgers officials estimated the cost of a new football facility at $150 million, and said half of it would be needed to be privately raised through fundraising before the state university moved ahead with a borrowing plan that would green-light the project.
The project received a major injection when the athletic department received $100 million from taxpayers in the 2022 state budget, but at the time, University officials noted that both the building of the practice facility and planned upgrades to Jersey Mike’s Arena will require “substantial private fundraising” before they can proceed.
Hobbs did not share an exact figure the department still needs to raise, but noted it is going to be “an expensive project.” He showed confidence that the department will raise the money needed.
“We’re going to need our fans and our donors to step up and help us, and I know they will, because they’ve seen what’s happened with other investments on campus,” Hobbs said.
Schiano said the school has “a good pool of money that we have ready for it,” but “we still have to add more to it.”
“It lost some of its priority when NIL came around, but you can’t stop growing in one area just because you’re going in another,” Schiano said. “It slowed the growth because you only have so many people you can go to. But we’re going to get it built, sooner or later.”
In the meantime, as the Scarlet Knights await the facility project to be completed, Schiano believes Rutgers has “what we need.”
“We have a great facility,” he said. “We put, I don’t know how much, into it to allow our players to reach their goals, like a lot of recovery stuff. What we don’t have is rock climbing walls and slides, but you know what? That’s not who we are. We’re a blue-collar crew. What we have, we can make it. Now, will a new building help us in recruiting? Sure it would. But right now, we’re fine. We’re going to keep raising money, and when we have it, we’ll build it.”
Hobbs’ comments on Monday came following a ceremony to unveil the athletic department’s partnership with Middlesex County to use a state-of-the-art facility that will serve as a home venue for the Scarlet Knights’ baseball program. Rutgers still plans to use and upgrade Bainton Field — its current on-campus home venue — but the partnership with Middlesex County “provided some modifications” to Rutgers’ facilities plans.
“Because if we had to build a full complex for baseball and softball that has all these amenities, obviously it is expensive to do that,” Hobbs said. “That can set you back from a timeline perspective, so this really does help.”
Upgrades to the baseball and softball facilities will be part of the master plan that Rutgers commissioned infrastructure firm AECOM to put together in March of 2020, as well as “ideas for renovations to its football stadium, basketball arena and other Olympic sports’ venues.”
Renovations to Jersey Mike’s Arena will be included in the master plan, and their completion is on a timeline. The submarine sandwich chain has opt-out clauses in its contract with the school, which kicks in if Rutgers does not “substantially renovate” the 8,000-seat, trapezoid-shaped arena by July 2029.
The timeline for those upgrades to the arena should become more clear in a few months’ time.
“We know what we want to do with the master plan, but we got some more tweaks we’re doing with that across some of our other programs,” Hobbs said. “It’ll be out in the fall.”