Fudge Development Center: Game-Changer for Baylor Football
On Friday, Oct. 11, the media toured the newly finished Fudge Football Development Center. After the tour, Jeremy Fudge, the building's namesake, held a brief press conference with the media and also spoke with SicEm365's David Smoak for a one-on-one interview.
Below the article is a photo gallery of the Fudge Football Development Center, courtesy of Baylor Athletics. The pictures may only be visible on the desktop version.
The newly finished $90 million, 103,000-square-foot Fudge Football Development Center will be a game-changer for Baylor's football program moving forward.
"Facility-wise, I think it puts us ahead of everybody right now," Jeremy Fudge, the building's namesake, told David Smoak in an interview last Friday. "It may not last forever, but it certainly does now. In terms of recruiting, it's a no-brainer. You come into this place and think it's better than some pro places I've seen."
When you first walk up the stairs from the main lobby and onto a walkway overlooking the Allison Indoor Practice Facility, a mural proudly shows several of Baylor's All-Americans, namely Walter Abercrombie, Mike Singletary, Bryce Petty, Robert Griffin III and Jalen Pitre, and lists their accomplishments.
"It was super important to bring in the history," Fudge told the other media in attendance. "This didn't start 10 years ago; it started a long time ago. It's important for a recruit to see that as their first thing. There's a long history of Baylor football and Baylor Athletics."
As you wind past the opening walkway, you enter the recruiting lounge, which displays awards, such as Griffin III's 2011 Heisman trophy, and offers a breathtaking view of McLane Stadium and the Brazos River.
Past the recruiting lounge, you enter the practice facility's main floor which houses coaching offices, meeting rooms and a team auditorium with space for over 205 people.
The hallways are laced with graphics showing Baylor players in the NFL, program mantras and a large picture of the 'McPlay' from the 2021 Big 12 Championship game. According to Fudge, the main auditorium is one of his favorite parts of the new sparkling facility.
"We didn't have a place where the whole team, including the staff and coaches, could be together," he said. "If you're trying to build something great and a community, you need to be together. When the players first came in, seeing them go crazy about a room with a bunch of chairs was cool and just validated that idea."
Next comes the player lounge, which includes plenty of flat-screen TVs, a PlayStation, a ping-pong table and a shuffleboard table. The lounge then directly leads down a stairwell into the spacious locker room, where every Baylor player has a customized screen above their locker.
Each locker also has built-in ventilation for shoulder pads and helmets and plenty of space for players to store their gear.
"[The players] are grateful, and they're thankful," Fudge said. "They were losing their minds when they toured it, just running around screaming like kids on a Christmas morning. It was really cool to see. They've all been awesome."
After the locker room comes the 14,000-square-foot weight room, which holds over $1.2 million worth of equipment. Accompanying the brand-new weight room are an expansive athletic training room, a state-of-the-art hydrotherapy treatment room and three recovery pools.
"When they first said that this is where it's going to be, I was like, 'How is this going to fit everything?'" Fudge said. "The use of the space is unbelievable. With the ceiling heights and all of this stuff, it's jammed in in many ways, but it doesn't feel that way at all."
Jeremy earned a B.A. magna cum laude from Baylor University in 1997 and currently serves as chief executive officer for Berry Appleman and Leiden LLP.
He and his wife, Kristy, have been longtime supporters of Baylor Athletics and originally agreed upon the donation in Indianapolis during the 2021 Final Four, where the Bears men's basketball team went on to win a National Championship.
"The biggest thing about Baylor and Baylor Athletics right now is how much our president and athletic director drive toward this philosophy of, 'As Christians, we need to be great,'" Fudge said. "If you're truly an ambassador of that in the world, you need to represent it well; you can't be shoddy at it. Whether it's R1 in academics or things in athletics, that vision holds true, and it's so personal and deep to me."
For Fudge, growing as an individual is something that every person should strive for, and he hopes that Baylor can do its best to facilitate that maturation.
"This is a place as a university and as an athletic department where you can truly develop and grow as a person, first and foremost, then academically, athletically and whatever else," he said. "We do it at a level intentionally focused on being great at that. It's far less about whether we have the nicest this or the biggest that or whatever. It's not competing for the sake of size or dollars or anything else. It's competing in the sense of, 'How do we raise our own standards of excellence constantly?'"
Fudge, also an advisory council member with Baylor's GXG NIL collective, believes that BU is well-positioned to remain competitive in the ever-changing landscape of college athletics.
"There's so much that goes into excellence; facilities and NIL are certainly part of it," Fudge said. "We're in a really good spot. You've got to be adaptable and flexible and able to navigate, and I think we've got that. David Kaye being specifically over that for us now is really, really important. We have the commitment, willpower and resources out there to stay at the level we're at."
With the Fudge Football Development Center now finished, as well as the Foster Pavillion and accompanying Allison Development Center for men's and women's basketball, Baylor is one of the nation's leaders in top-notch facilities for major sports.
"At the risk of our athletic director's telling me this is the wrong answer, I feel like we're in a really good spot right now as far as athletic structure goes," Fudge joked. "I think you can do some renovations over at Ferrell [Center], and I think there are some other things that need some sprucing up, but I think, by and large, these are the big pieces, but it'll be a little while, but there's always a need to keep going and doing more."