In December of 2011, Tulane athletic director Rick Dickson hired Curtis Johnson as head football coach and announced a bold project to build a 30,000 seat on-campus stadium from scratch. Johnson has since led the program to its first bowl appearance in a decade and Yulman Stadium is set to open for the 2014 season when the Green Wave hosts Georgia Tech.

Last Friday, I sat down with Rick Dickson to talk about the new stadium, momentum, and the impact of Curtis Johnson’s refreshing positive outlook.

You are five months out from opening an on-campus football stadium. Construction workers are now working seven days a week and the weekly progress is significant. It’s been a long and rewarding process. As you sit in your office right next to the stadium, what are your feelings right now? Are you confident, concerned, nervous, or anxious?

Yes, all of the above. (laughs) There are multiple checklists in so many areas. The other part is that I’m in this office so infrequently because this is turning out to be above $75 million project and it was initially set out to be about $50 million, so a lot of my time, probably on average four days a week, I’m out fundraising. This is a completely privately funded project. In Tulane’s case, 82% of our alums are outside of the state of Louisiana. I’m somewhere in this country always. I’m usually gone on Tuesdays and back on Friday, conduct meetings all day on Monday and then gone on Tuesday and back on Friday. It’s usually the weekend when I get to see the progress and get caught up. Now, we’re into the sale of the stadium, really highly focused on the three club levels, which will be a huge impact financially on us, probably $10 million dollars a year. That’s huge before we ever even sell a ticket. So a lot of our focus is on that. We also have a game day operation crew, which is the operation of the stadium. We also have another campus group that is focused on game day itself and what it means for a campus that hasn’t had a stadium in forty years. This is what it means… hey, Friday at 5 o’clock the campus has to be devoid of cars. It means starting at 8 am the vendors are in here, the security, and on and on. It’s the coordination to pull it all together and it’s something that we haven’t done since 1973.

Curtis Johnson is uplifting. His attitude is infectious. It means a lot to Tulane fans, but can you describe how it has impacted the university?

With 80% of our alums out of this state, I’m out there fundraising. Our alums read the internet. His enthusiasm blows through those pipes quickly. Going back and looking at the coaching search, CJ and the current offensive coordinator with the Bears, Aaron Kromer, were the two guys. Saints general manager Mickey Loomis and I have known each other for twenty years. Just like five years ago with Bob Toledo, I knew I was going to get inundated with NFL assistants trying to get the job. I told Mickey we had to build this thing from inside-out. This is the third talent richest state in the country, so we wanted to start here and have a guy that believed in doing that. We also needed a guy that didn’t look at us as half-empty. So Mickey said that he might have a couple of guys. It was the first time in my career that I did an in-season coaching change, which made the parameters different. I wasn’t going to go behind someone’s back and talk to an active coach, but it allowed me to get a jumpstart by talking some out-of-season coaches. I had a lot of agents calling. The first week when I came back in town from fundraising for the stadium project I interviewed Aaron Kromer and CJ. Aaron had a lot of positives including a stint at Northwestern, but for us, CJ had at been at private schools SMU and Miami but he was also from here. He knows this area. I thought ‘Okay, of the NFL guys, CJ would be the one I would hone in on.’ I kept going out when the active guys became available to talk to, but I kept coming back to New Orleans and I met with CJ three or four times. Once, I had him at my house. Twice, I met with him at the Saints facility. Once, we met a President Cowen’s house. He said that he knew this area and that he had a plan specifically for Tulane. The more I was around him and the more I listened…. I kept the notes… that second time I was with him I asked him to talk to me about his staff. He showed me a list of eleven guys. He said, ‘These would be the first nine.’ Sure enough, those were the nine guys that he hired. Nobody I talked to was as detailed or as thought out about that part of it. He was 48 or 49-years-old at the time and probably had long time been waiting for that opportunity. He was as detailed and thorough about that part of it and it greatly impressed me. Then we talked about developing a roster, morning practices, what he would do differently. Morning practices… which I’m a big convert of because we are a Top 40 university in the world where our kids are challenged academically… so what are you going to do to recruit guys that can succeed academically here but also keep them here? He was so thorough about every detail. He was the right fight for what we needed. And now, looking back, the staff continuity has been great. Of course, (quarterbacks coach) Mike Neu left for the Saints but we knew that from the beginning. CJ even said that upfront. He said that Mike is going to come with me, but he’s going to go back to the NFL at some point.

There really isn’t a blueprint in recent time of building an on-campus stadium from scratch for a major college football team. You literally started from scratch. What’s been the best phone call you’ve made to help you along the way?

Pete, I’ve been in it long enough. I started at 32 and I’ve been in it 27 years as an AD. A lot of my protégés are getting a kick out of seeing the old man getting to go through this exercise, but it’s been fun. We’ve spent a lot of time over at TCU. Chris Del Conte is one of my guys that I had at Washington State. They replaced… really they leveled Amon Carter Stadium and started from the ground up. Timing-wise and proximity because it’s only two hours (flight), we’ve had a steady stream of people going back and forth. I may call and ask Chris if it’s okay to send this team over this week. Because they are a couple of years ahead of us, our people have got to watch every aspect of the development and operation of that stadium. TCU is a private school in an urban setting so things like neighborhood issues, parking, security, dining, clubs… Not that we haven’t gone to other places like Florida Atlantic, but TCU, because of my relationship with Chris has been the go-to steady stream for having a peer that has experience it, so we could watch as it grew out of the ground.

The football program took the next step last season by earning a bowl bid. Quite frankly, the Green Wave earned a lot of respect for the way they competed against UL-Lafayette. It was a great game in front of 54,000 on a Saturday night in the Superdome. Even though you lose a heartbreaker, this program certainly has momentum in the big-picture, especially with Curtis Johnson as the leader. How important is the timing of this momentum?

Yulman Stadium: March 21 photo

Within days or weeks of receiving a bowl bid, I said jokingly to the media that CJ is pretty much on schedule with what we had discussed. I said, ‘Listen, I’m opening a stadium in year three, so I need you to go to a bowl game in year two.’ (laughs) CJ looked at me like ‘What are you telling me?’(laughs) I was just messing with him. Of course, you couldn’t have written it better because the truth is that we were rebuilding since 2005 (Hurricane Katrina). Even though people were critical of Bob Toledo and his staff, they put a lot of bricks and mortar in place, so a lot of the preliminary work had started and then CJ and his staff have come in and in a short time frame really expedited and taken it to a new level. We always believed in year three and four we’d see that, but (it’s happened earlier). To go win in C-USA with defense and special teams, I haven’t seen in my entire time here. It’s usually the team that scores last (wins). It was certainly a boost to win last season. We opened up the entire stadium for sale in April and we’re 90% sold on an ambitious schedule that by all rights we didn’t have the right to say we’re going to see a club that’s half-full of hundred thousand dollar donors and then other half fifty. That’s like twenty years’ worth of season tickets at Tulane. Are you kidding me? 90% of our capacity is sold and then we’ll open the public sale, the general seats and so forth. It couldn’t have been a better pre-sale environment, certainly aided by CJ.

Coming later this week…. Rick Dickson explains how Curtis Johnson has created "The Tulane Way."

