WIN A BOWL, BUILD AN INDOOR PRACTICE FIELD. NIU plans $9.5 million center at stadium. Why do the vertical columns of light bother me?

Rendering of Academic and Athletic Performance Center

Once the development office finishes raising $7 million from donors, the university will kick in another $2.5 million, which officials assure us will not use student fee moneys or state funds. Of course not. Watch for further recisions in the budgets of the academic units. (As I understand it, Liberal Arts generates about $43 million in tuition revenues but receives a $41 million operating budget.) But something had to be done about the so-called revenue sports falling below average on the NCAA Academic Progress Rate charts.

According to the updated floor plan, the building will be positioned on a three-foot grass berm and located adjacent to the north end zone of Huskie Stadium. The building will be connected by a hallway to the West Grandstand infrastructure and the centerpiece of the main floor will be the Academic Support Center, which features a fully equipped technology lab with Internet access. The Academic Support Center will have four areas for private study, group study, one-on-one tutoring and guest lectures, plus additional office space for Student-Athlete Support Services personnel.

Scholarship athletes will have access to computers close to the practice field, but liberal arts graduate students will have their computer labs moved away from their home departments.

"When prospective student-athletes and their parents tour our new facilities, the Academic Support Center will make an awesome first impression," [athletics director Jim] Phillips said. "It will clearly emphasize our programmatic and institutional obligation to the 'student' in the phrase 'student-athlete.'"

Just make sure the recruits don't tour the classrooms or the faculty offices, if in fact there will be any faculty offices. The institutional obligation stops at Stadium Drive, I guess. It's nice to know that some people's wish lists get read.

Phillips said the project almost doubled in size and increased in price from $5.4 million to $9.5 million when NIU asked its 17 coaches and their athletes for input in what they needed in the new building.

Several MAC schools recently built -- or are in the process of building -- similar centers.

"Those folks have a jump start on us," Phillips said. "that's OK. We have a chance to catch up quickly."

NIU's football players can't wait.

"It was one of the reasons I came here," said freshman running back Montell Clanton of Rockford Guilford.

"Think of people seeing it on TV," Novak said. "Jim (Phillips) has talked about athletics being the front porch of the university. Our facilities are our front porch of our athletics program."

I don't recall the football team's troubles hampering the discovery of the top quark, or the ineptitude of the basketball team cramping the steel band's style. What is the economics department, the broom closet?