The proposed new on-campus football stadium at Colorado State University isn’t dead. But school president Tony Frank Thursday conceded that the publicized Plan A — tied to raising approximately half the cost of the project from private contributions in a two-year drive — is off the table.

Frank announced in a campus-wide email that he will tell the CSU system’s board of governors next week that the school won’t reach the announced $110 million goal, and that the figure raised was roughly $50 million.

“I will not be bringing (the board) a plan of finance at the October meeting,” he wrote.

He added, “I will be recommending to the board of governors that I be allowed to examine at least four options over the next two months before bringing them a final recommendation at their December 2014 meeting.”

Those options, he said, included sticking with off-campus Hughes Stadium as the home of the Rams football program — something he made clear he would prefer to avoid — or finding alternative ways to finance and proceed with the new stadium project.

Totaling the contributions for the stadium is tricky because it involves decisions on at what point to consider pledges or other contributions to be finalized and counted in the total. Frank said he felt “comfortable” saying CSU “could rely on approximately $50M (million) in philanthropic funds.” He said that “compares favorably” with similar stadium fund-raising efforts at Washington and Minnesota. “But it is, by my arithmetic, less than $110 (million),” he wrote.

In the wake of the email’s release, Frank said that he hoped those who made pledges or contributions will “stay with us … until we reach a final decision and see if that’s something they can support. Our development team will be working carefully with the donors.”

The only major surprise involved in Frank’s announcement was its timing, coming a week before the Oct. 2-3 meeting of the board of governors. As members of the university community were reading it Thursday, Frank said he “wanted to give people a chance to organize their thoughts for public comment to the board.”

In the wake of the August firing of athletic director Jack Graham, Frank last month conceded that reaching the $110 million goal was unlikely at best and broadly discussed other financing options.

He was more specific about them in his Thursday email.

One possibility, he said, would be to commit to merely “maintaining” Hughes Stadium, which opened in 1968. He said that it would be expensive and wouldn’t be cost effective. Also, he said that the $30 million cost of deferred maintenance “would need to come from the university’s general fund, whether in annual cash expenditures over something like a 10-year period, or via general obligation bonds issued by the university to allow all the repairs to be conducted immediately.”

He noted that “despite my concerns,” sticking with the stadium “is a legitimate option and one we could choose to afford, so it deserves to be considered.”

A second possibility, Frank wrote, would be what he labeled “Hughes 2050,” involving “a decision to substantially modernize and improve Hughes Stadium and to remain there for nearly four additional decades. Such a plan would involve substantial additional cost, but it would also provide new revenue to to support revenue bonds and there might be more excitement among our donor base.”

Beyond that, Frank said the options tied to going ahead with the new stadium would be to “phase” the project, building a base-type, lower-cost model that could be expanded when financially feasible; or go back to step one and “rebid our existing plan as a public-private partnership.” He added, “This could involve various scenarios, with one being that a private entity constructs and maintains the stadium to our specifications over multiple decades for annual payments.”

Frank said he expected to hear the argument that the fund-raising drive simply could be extended, but said: “I am concerned that in the face of rising construction costs, each additional delay in a decision — regardless of the decision — results in cost escalation and expenditures on temporary repairs at Hughes Stadium that do not serve our university well.”

After his firing, Graham said CSU had raised roughly $45 million for the project, and that the total likely would have been at least $60 million by the time Frank reported to the board of governors in October. He also responded that he had been told early in the process that the more realistic and true in-house goal was $75 million.

At that time, Frank also emphasized that he didn’t consider remaining in Hughes Stadium a palatable option, the point he made again at length in his Thursday email.

In his mass 2,300-word email, Frank was self-effacing at times, even opening with a mention of his beloved (and hapless) Chicago Cubs and teasing himself about its length. Late in the email, he offered a passionate defense of continuing to emphasize sports as a public face of the university. He argued for continued high athletic ambitions, even with looming changes in the NCAA landscape that likely will widen the gap between the five “power” conferences and the five other Football Bowl Subdivision leagues, which include the Rams’ Mountain West Conference. And he said that would be consistent with the overall mission and stature of the university.

He mentioned many of CSU’s academic programs and noted, “They did not become what they are because people settled for less than excellence. These programs exist because we, and those who came before us in these programs, rolled up our sleeves, committed to the work needed to excel and held ourselves accountable. I have yet to hear an explanation compelling me to believe those same principles don’t apply to athletics. Settling is simply not who CSU is.”

Terry Frei: tfrei@denverpost.com or twitter.com/TFrei