Oklahoma AD Roger Denny Eager to Get Going on Memorial Stadium Renovation

The Sooners' new athletic director met with media Tuesday and said he likes what he's seen on the $450 million project, but any ideas he might have for changes will come when the time is right.

Oklahoma AD Roger Denny | John E. Hoover / Sooners On SI

TULSA — New Oklahoma athletic director Roger Denny has already dived into the plans for the massive renovation of the west side of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, and he has a few ideas.

Many of which will have to wait.

“I’m not gonna change anything until I really understand why it is where it is, and we’re not at that point yet,” Denny told Sooners On SI on Tuesday during a downtown press briefing from the 31st floor of the Arvest Tower.

Prior to meeting with the OU Club of Tulsa, Denny spent nearly 20 minutes with local media answering questions about his first few weeks on the job on the heels of Joe Castiglione’s retirement as AD.

“I love it,” Denny said of his new job. “It’s as much fun as you could ever have professionally. It’s truly is a dream come true. I said in my introductory presser, this is all about purpose and impact, and every day you wake up with that sense of purpose and that, just hope that you can have an impact on a program and a university and a community. It certainly checks those two boxes. It’s been a fun two months.”

Denny was a key figure in the significant renovation of Gies Memorial Stadium at Illinois — which included landing a $100 million gift last fall.

He knows his way around stadium blueprints.

“I think I’ll have plenty of input on it. I think right now we’re still evaluating those plans,” Denny said. 

OU announced in November that the Board of Regents had approved the “Palace Project,” a renovation of Memorial Stadium that focuses on the west side and includes the addition of 4,000 new club seats, 47 new luxury suites and amenity upgrades throughout. 

Rendering of the new west side of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium | OU Football via Twitter/X

The project is set to begin at the end of the 2027 season and will reduce overall capacity by approximately 7,000 to about 73,000 seats. Completion is scheduled for the summer of 2029.

Right now, Denny said, any talk of stadium renovation is focused on one thing: 

“Evaluating how kind of the phasing of that project impacts our revenue model and football,” he said. “So I’ve talked openly: the resources matter right now, and the timing of those resources matters. So making sure we’ve got that project phased up so that we’re in a position to take advantage of any resource growth that we get out of it so that we can reinvest in the program and in the fan experiences, is the part of the evaluation that we’re in right now.”

It’s still too early to reveals many specifics, but Denny said he likes what he’s seen so far. 

But he also expects he’ll have plenty of input when the time comes.

“Yeah, it certainly is an incredible project that a lot of really smart folks have spent a lot of time on,” he said. “And so I don’t have the hubris to look at something and come in and say, ‘Notwithstanding all that time and thought that went into it, I think I have a better idea.’ I like a lot of it. I think there is room for improvement on the edges.”

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As a first-year member of the Southeastern Conference in fiscal year 2025, OU received just $12.5 million from the SEC. But that revenue has been estimated to be around $72 million next year.

Denny said the coming financial boost from Year 2 in the SEC won’t be earmarked for the football stadium project.

“Right now, that project is being funded through the fundraising efforts of our development team,” Denny said. “And so we’ll continue to pursue it down that path.”

Denny also revealed that the FY 2026 budget has been “built at this point, with a few months left in the year, for sure. So the budget’s built, and right now we’re really working on next year’s budget and allocating resources through that budget.”

That reflects one of the changes he’s already implemented on the Norman campus, and it’s a big one as college athletics continues to evolve at warp speed.

“One of the things we’re gonna change early on is really start budgeting two years in advance,” Denny said. “And so trying to, as best we can, understand how quickly things are changing and get to budgeting two and three years at a time instead of three or four months ahead of schedule.”

Denny said he couldn’t confirm the approximate $72 million number that’s been widely projected.

“We do have a projection (from the SEC),” he said. “I’d share it if I knew exactly what the number is, but I don’t have that one committed to memory yet. But I do think they do a good job of providing us a projection. 

“And if the experience in the SEC is anything like it was in the Big Ten, they give us a number that is almost always reliable but is almost always a little bit short of where it ends up being. And so I assume there’s a similar level of conservatism in the SEC. But someone in our department knows what our budget is at this point.”

As for the continuing sea change college sports has endured over the last five years, Denny said he’s absolutely keeping an eye on the drastic steps that some schools have taken, such as Kentucky moving its entire athletic department under an LLC called Champions Blue LLC, which will manage costs, revenue sharing, fundraising, NIL and other elements — basically privatizing the operations of the athletic department and removing it from the bureaucracy of a public university, or Cal laying off dozens of employees and outsourcing its entire marketing, communications and creative staff to save money.

He said he’s been keeping an eye on those and recent big changes at other schools, like Clemson and Michigan State.

“Of course you do,” Denny said. “I think all of us are looking for what’s the right way to address all the changes in our industry, so when you see your peers taking big steps like that, you’ve got to take a look at it and you figure out what you can from the press releases. If you have relationships with people, you call who you can and say, ‘Hey, how’s this actually working?’ Ultimately, you monitor it and see if it has the desired impact. 

“ … Everyone’s got to figure out what’s right for their institution, and those leaders thought that was right for their institution. I’ve yet to see anything that we’re gonna go copy right off the shelf, but you take little elements of those things and piece it together for a plan of what we want to do.”

Do all the sweeping changes seem scary to a first-time athletic director at the helm of a department that reported $177 million revenue in 2025 — a figure that ranks 10th in the nation (seventh in the SEC)? 

“It’s exciting,” Denny said. “I don’t know. Right now there’s so much change of every corner of our business — in how we interact with our fans, how we interact with our governance structure, our media structure, our relationships with our student athletes. 

“Like, there’s so much change every day that, to some degree, you get a little desensitized to it. But I don’t know that I would say it’s that scary. But again, you just gotta be real careful and evaluate what’s right for your program. Again, I’ve yet to see one of those that we want to copy and paste.”