FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.– As much as I personally like Clemson football coach Dabo Sweeney, the idea of his university investing in a $62 million dollar football facility seems over the top.

Clemson has become the latest poster child for excessive spending in college sports. The Tigers’ new 140,000-square foot facility have all the basics- a strength and conditioning weight room, sports medicine, a dining hall, meeting rooms and offices. But it will also include multiple lounges with ping pong tables and pool tables, a miniature golf course, a golf simulator, laser tag, a bowling alley, a barber shop, sand volleyball courts and a 24 seat HD theatre– all for the players.

There is also a mention of an “indoor slide” being put in the facility.

In the lobby of the complex, there will be a replica of Howard’s Rock and the hill that players run down before games at Memorial Stadium.

It’s called the Clemson Experience but it seems more like a Disney theme park. It is certainly the ultimate recruiting inducement and puts the public ACC school on equal footing as a school like Oregon, which used $95 million dollars in Nike money to build its own day spa for football players.

Construction on the project, which will be located across Perimeter Road from 80,000 seat Memorial Stadium, started in November and is expected to be completed by February, 2017. It will allow football players to meet, work, dress and practice in the same location with Memorial being reserved for game day. The current office space in Memorial Stadium will be used for athletic department staff. The entire football operation will be run out of the new state of the art facility.

College football is big business, with shoe companies like Nike Inc., Under Armour Inc. and Adidas AG paying elite programs millions of dollars a year for apparel contracts and lucrative bowl-game payouts. Thanks to the College Football Playoff, bowl games paid more than a half billion dollars to conferences and schools last season, the largest payout ever and an increase of almost $200 million from the final season of the Bowl Championship Series.

The Atlantic Coast Conference paid Clemson about $26 million in the 2014-2015 fiscal year, mostly in connection with sports broadcasts, with $18 million coming from football, offering documents show. That’s the highest distribution in at least a decade, and up from $8.8 million 10 years ago. Its athletic department brought in $87 million of operating revenue, the highest in at least five years.

The next time colleges cry poor mouth, raise tuition and normal students fall deeper in debt, remember that.

The top-seeded Tigers (13-0), who play fourth-seed Big 12 champion Oklahoma (11-1) here Thursday night in the national semi-finals at Sun Lite Stadium, are just the latest Power 5 program to make a big push in a facilities arms race in an attempt to give themselves a wow factor in recruiting as they attempt to build on the success of this season and become a perennial contender for one of the four spots in the college football playoffs. Sweeney was already showing off architect’s plans to prospective recruiting at his football camp last summer.

Clemson president Dan Radokovich has been quick to defend the ambitious project. suggesting to USA Today that no university. student or state funds were used in construction and the school relied on the generosity of donors for the funding. He also pointed out the school intended to repurpose the football space to create a 38,000-square foot academic center for every student athlete, which has resulted in an impressive 91 percent graduation rate.

Clemson has already shown it is serious about winning big in football by spending $2.53 in recruiting from 2009 through 2013. By comparison, rival South Carolina spent  $1.32 in recruiting over the same period.

The ACC does not make the same kind of money that the SEC generates from its own ESPN TV channel, the SEC network, and Clemson has made a conscious effort to spend its money strategically to keep up with its neighbors. The Tigers like the idea of curb appeal.