Matt Baker

So you can envision scenarios where –

If I'm visiting Kansas and they have this nice, shiny new district I'm walking around, oh, you know, KU is much cooler than I thought it was going to be.

That's kind of a point in the Kansas column as I'm considering Kansas or Kansas State or Michigan or whatever, right?

So there's all sorts of factors that go into it.

We can't silo it just in the sports part even though we're talking about sports right now.

I don't think that's a crazy doomsday scenario, but it certainly is from the athletic perspective.

But again, we have to look at this from the university side as well, where I'll give you another example.

Tennessee is doing something like this right next to Neyland.

And I was listening to their chancellor speaking at a meeting in the last couple of months.

And their point was that something like this doesn't exist at the University of Tennessee.

So once this opens up,

Students are going to have a place to go get a burger on campus and not have to drive further away on a scooter or a car that they may or may not have.

That part of this whole project, this whole thing, is something we can't undersell either because it's making – if this works well, it will make the student experience as a whole better.

And I'm going to go down a rabbit hole briefly, but there's a lot of forces going on in higher education as a whole, from the rise in AI, and who knows when that's going to happen.

There's something called a demographic cliff or an enrollment cliff, where basically there's fewer...

18 to 22-year-olds coming down the pike just because there weren't as many kids being born 18 and 22 years ago.

So that means the competition for students at a university is going to get tougher and tougher.

So anything that my school can do to give me a leg up on getting students to my campus where we make the most money and getting them to my place and not yours is something that matters.

So if we view the Sightown District at Iowa State or the Gateway Project at Kansas or

Tennessee and these others, if we view it as a marketing tool and a tool to help these students experience at that school as a whole, then that kind of shifts the dynamic because it could mean better enrollment, more admissions, that type of thing to those schools, which helps fuel the money.