When the Carrier Dome was built in 1980, only one detail was certain about its future. It would always be called the Carrier Dome.

A $2.75 million gift from Mel Holm, the CEO of Carrier Corporation, gave Carrier the naming rights of the Dome in perpetuity. Other than the name, there was little else anyone could predict about what would become of a 50,000-seat stadium in Central New York.

Twenty-six years later, the construction of the Carrier Dome has paid big dividends for Syracuse University. The stadium attracts fans, athletes and media outlets to its doors as they all want to experience an event at one of the most renowned college athletic facilities in the nation.

The flood of corporate sponsorship naming right deals in the past decade calls into question how beneficial the agreement with Carrier was for Syracuse University and whether the SU administration should have been more hesitant to give a corporate sponsor an eternal claim to the Dome.

After Syracuse set the standard for corporate sponsor naming right deals in college sports in 1979, numerous expensive naming right deals have taken place.

Naming right deals provide funds for athletic departments, especially for the construction and renovation of a stadium. The deals have continued to become more lucrative.

Most recently, Minnesota announced in 2005 its new $235 million on-campus football stadium would be called TCF Financial Field. TCF Financial Corp. paid UM $35 million.

Louisville opened Papa John’s Cardinals Stadium in 1998 after receiving $5 million from Papa John’s Pizza. U of L is looking for a corporate sponsor to pay $40 million for the naming rights of a soon to be built basketball arena, according to various media reports.

Dr. Jake Crouthamel, who was athletic director at Syracuse at the time of the Carrier Dome’s construction, said Syracuse ended up with a raw deal in hindsight. However, the deal seemed necessary back then.

‘(The donation) was better than nothing and nothing was what we were dealing with,’ Crouthamel said. ‘In retrospect from a purely financial standpoint it was not a good deal, but it was the only deal out there and that to us was sure better than nothing.’

The university wanted $26 million to build the ideal stadium for handling the chilly northeast winters. A majority of the money came from funding by New York state and the school received funds from businesses and alumni. The $2.75 million from Carrier provided the most money from a private investor.

Professor Michael Veley, who directs the sport management program at Syracuse, explained the agreement with Carrier could be likened more to a gift than an actual naming right transaction.

Veley described the deal as similar to a situation where an alumnus gives money to the school and as a result his or her name is permanently bestowed upon a physics building.

The school had been looking for a business to donate a charitable amount of money to fund the venue, Crouthamel said. When Syracuse could not find any takers, Holm, the chair of SU’s Board of Trustees, decided to make a contribution from Carrier, possibly to strengthen the Syracuse-based business’s community ties.

Crouthamel praised Holm for his donation at a time when Syracuse seemed desperate for a corporate sponsor. Crouthamel said nobody wanted to risk investing in a 50,000-seat stadium at a school of 15,000 students within a city infamous for its bitter winters.

Tom Benzel, the original manager of the Carrier Dome, believes obtaining the final donation from Carrier was crucial for its success today.

The planners for the Dome, which was built to replace the undersized Manley Field House, emphasized having every aspect of the construction figured out before beginning to build.

The contribution from Carrier left Syracuse with just $2 million of debt to pay-an amount of money that easily could be covered once the school began offering items to fans like box seats and season tickets.

Crouthamel thinks it would have been possible to fund the Dome even without the gift from Carrier. However, the school would have to go through debt service for a few years to pay off the amount overdue on the stadium.

The opportunity for Syracuse to rise into the black after one year through Carrier’s donation was an offer that the university could not to pass up, especially considering the facility’s success was difficult to foresee.

‘I’m sure no one at the time had any inclination of the Carrier Dome being as visible and as prominent of a sports facility in the country as it has become,’ Crouthamel said.

Benzel said he felt 26 years ago the Dome would be a success simply because of the planning that went into the stadium. The Carrier Dome was placed right in the middle of a college campus and built with the proper materials that would allow it to last decades in the cold.

The Dome was built only with features essential to its existence. For example, the long Syracuse winters resulted in the decision to not place air conditioners in a venue sponsored by an air conditioning company.

Even though the Dome’s planners stressed solely the essentials, having almost the entire budget at hand kept builders from cutting corners when it came to the stadium’s design.

The Carrier Dome had been constructed not to be a fancy, ground-breaking structure. It was built to last, Benzel said.

Crouthamel maintains the Carrier Dome would not have reached the reputation it has today if it were not for a series of coincidences. If anybody anticipated these coincidences then the stadium might not have needed the safety net provided by Carrier.

‘I don’t think that we even knew what the potential was,’ Crouthamel said. ‘At the time, we were not thinking of basketball playing at the Dome. At the time we were not thinking of huge outdoor concerts being invited to play in the Dome. And these were all sources of revenue. In hindsight, we probably could have financed (the Dome with revenues from basketball and concerts).’

Benzel said the decision to play basketball in the Dome came early on in the building’s construction because the building needed additional revenue streams. Still, Crouthamel disclosed he had to drag men’s basketball coach Jim Boeheim out of Manley where the Orange seemed unbeatable.

‘There needed to be additional revenue streams,’ Benzel said. ‘The capacity of Manley Field House was inadequate to the demand of the Central New York community. When you looked at the Dome relative to sightlines you recognize the sightlines were more than acceptable for basketball.’

The choice to bring basketball into the Dome not only benefited the brand new Carrier Dome, but also caught the eye of another blossoming sports-related innovation-ESPN.

The sports network was founded in 1979 and the station’s creators found the Carrier Dome an exciting place to showcase a sports event and consequently broadcast many games from the venue-giving the stadium national attention in its first year.

The Big East conference also came into existence in 1979 and provided another way for the Dome to grab attention.

‘The creation of the Big East Conference really was a godsend in a lot of different ways,’ Crouthamel said. ‘And certainly so to the Carrier Dome.’

Crouthamel said there is little Syracuse can do to take advantage of the Dome’s popularity by re-selling its naming rights to the highest bidder. He said there have been discussions with senior management at Carrier, but sees no reason for Carrier to acquiesce. And he doesn’t blame them because ‘it’s a business’ and Carrier originally took a risk to fund the Dome.

‘It wasn’t fashionable for corporate America to attach their name and identification with sports sponsorship at that point,’ Veley said. ‘In the last 15 years the sports industry has exploded with corporate relationships and some of the most prominent relationships in terms of financial undertakings is directly associated with having the naming of the stadium.’

In addition, rarely do corporations deal in perpetuity today, Veley said. And even when they do there are always out clauses in the contract.

Carrier Corporation spokesman Jon Shaw said when Holm first agreed to contribute to the funding of the stadium it was not known Carrier would have its name become a part of the Dome’s title. Only after Holm announced his donation was the deal for the Dome naming right negotiated.

The naming right agreement served as one of the earliest such business deals ever and the first for a domed stadium and a college facility. Shaw believes it is difficult to criticize such a deal when it happened at a time when naming right negotiations were almost nonexistent.

‘It was the first stadium to have support from a corporate sponsor,’ Shaw said. ‘There was no precedent until that.’

Veley, who served as an associate athletic director at Syracuse University until 2005, said the athletic department accepts its powerlessness to sell the Dome’s naming rights.

There appears to be a limited number of prominent stadiums remaining that are willing to negotiate naming rights, and Syracuse/ISP Sports general manager, Joe Baldini, believes the selling of multimedia rights represents the top way for schools to negotiate with corporate sponsors.

‘If you look at the BCS schools and the number of schools that (have sold) their multimedia rights, it’s already the wave of the future,’ Baldini said.

All athletic departments want to bring in as much revenue as possible, and having the naming right to one of the most visible college venues in the country would aid the athletic department. Nevertheless, with the entire college athletics market more profitable there are enough methods for the athletic department to bring in money.

What is significant to Benzel is the Carrier Dome draws crowds every season.

It fulfilled its purpose far better than the average venue because it had the money to be built like it was blueprinted. As long as the stadium continues to bring in top dollar by attracting sports from across the nation, it shouldn’t matter that Carrier can retain its name on the Dome forever.

‘The contribution made by Carrier was significant then,’ Benzel said. ‘You can’t compare then to today. That was an important gift to allow the budget to be met to construct the building and to be able to serve the community.’

Published on December 6, 2006 at 12:00 pm