In just seven months Arizona State will return to Frank Kush Field for another football game. As soon as that season is over, the green grass will once again give way to dirt and concrete as the stadium finishes its renovations.

Athletic director Ray Anderson sees much more than just the piles of dirt outside his office – he sees a vision.

For one, the stadium entrenched in Tempe’s “A” Mountain may hold a new name when the stadium “reinvention” is complete in 2017. Anderson said Thursday that the Sun Devil athletic department has begun the process of looking for a naming rights deal.

“We have basically what amounts to a naming rights working group,” he said. “They’re going through all the possibilities and lining up our list of potential sponsors. Some of them will not be shy about competing with State Farm, which has those buildings beside the stadium. They need competition, don’t they? We’re making sure that we do that.”

Among the new amenities of the stadium will be a brand-new football complex on the north side of the end zone. The future, and what it brings with it, has become an instant recruiting tool for ASU football coach Todd Graham.

“Just think from programmatically around the country, how many programs and especially as a coaching staff to be here at this place at this time with the leadership that we have in place and the transformational time that's happening with the facility and with the program,” Graham said.

Graham, who alongside Anderson has donated half of a million dollars to the Sun Devil Reinvention project, said the commitment of the University to the football program has shown in its ability to recruit and presents an “unprecedented” time in the history of the school’s athletics.

Graham said he expects the renovations to be 75 percent complete by the start of the 2016 season, and will be completely finished before the 2017 football season. Due to the ongoing construction, the Sun Devils are not expected to host a spring game this season.

While the stadium currently sits with little semblance of what to come, Anderson has shown an interest in turning the stadium into a promotional tool for the University as a whole in addition to the football program.

“One of the things that has been the most pleasing from the process has been the input from folks outside of athletics that have contributed to the thoughts about designing that facility so in fact it is an all-purpose, multi-purpose, multi-constituents and in fact a multi-cultural place,” Anderson said. “It’s not just a place where you play football.”

One of the ways ASU students have been involved, Anderson said, was through the University’s design school. The school assigned 350 students, divided into groups of 10 students each, to devise a way to use Sun Devil Stadium that does not involve football.

“One idea was simple as this: now that we have a concourse that is completely connected around the main concourse, one of the ideas was to have a track so that people can go in at any time and walk or run and they’re in the shade,” Anderson said. “It’s like an open park where you can go in there anytime and do laps.”

Whereas many people who design stadiums like to take ideas from similar projects, Anderson found that the students’ ideas came from much broader inspirations.

“On the field with all that beautiful grass, why isn’t that like the Boston Commons?” he asked.

In addition to taking students’ ideas, Anderson looks to generate brand-new uses for Sun Devil Stadium in what he dubbed “Sun Devil Central.”

The central location will look not just to honor athletic achievement, but also serve to be a demonstration of all aspects of an Arizona State University education.

“You’re going to have classrooms in there,” he said. “You’re going to have studios – why don’t we have another (Walter Cronkite School of Journalism) studio here in the stadium? You can have concerts, sorority functions, whatever! Weddings, job fairs, expositions, galleries.”

The goal, Anderson said, was to continue breaking down the barriers he saw between the athletic department and academic institution when he first took the job early in 2014.

“When we got here, there were some silos that we had to break down,” he said. “When I got here, there was a sense for a lot of folks on campus and some of the other units that athletics was kind of a cocky, stand alone, kind of a condescending in saying ‘We’re athletics, and you’re not.’

“Breaking down those silos and really engaging and trying to really engage people in other departments to say, ‘We really want to be a collaborator.’ We want to be a partner.”

Two years later, Anderson is still making his mark.