How a late fundraising kick got NU’s $155 million facility project a new set of downs | Football

If not for a one-year delay due to the coronavirus pandemic, the project would be nearly halfway completed by now. Moos, though, said he’s a fan of making lemonade out of lemons and noted that the design team had an extra year to fine-tune the details. Details, he said, which are being guarded from competition in many respects. 

“I’ve built a couple of these, and the concern is competition,” Moos said. “Eventually it’s going to have to happen because of recruiting and that part. But our people and our design team, especially (Kansas City-based design firm) Populous, people call them that are planning these buildings or have already got one approved and ask, ‘What’s Nebraska doing?’ They’re tight-lipped. This isn’t their first rodeo either. … 

“I can tell you this: It’s uncharted territory.” 

Moos said he pulled some designs from his two sons, Bo and Ben, who each played major college football. 

The updated renderings of the exterior look quite a bit different from the 2019 images from the unveiling of the project, which Davison said is a product of the time the design team had and just simply the project moving forward through the design phase. 

“The original was just kind of a way to show you the footprint of it and we hadn’t even really started the design of it, so it was always going to look different,” Davison said. “Populous is all over the world doing this stuff, so they know what they’re doing and they came up with these ideas and it’s great. Bill is right, it’s just way better now.”