Missouri’s incoming athletic director Mack Rhoades made it clear Thursday that the south end zone project that football coach Gary Pinkel has pushed so hard to get will move forward immediately.

The Tigers initially planned to build an indoor football practice facility, but Pinkel pushed outgoing athletic director Mike Alden, privately and publicly, to instead improve the stadium. Alden announced the project to reporters in December, but there were some questions about what would happen when Mizzou changed athletic directors.

“It is a top priority for us and we’ll begin on that immediately,” Rhoades said Thursday on KTGR’s “The Big Show” in Columbia.

“What shape or form it takes, I think there still needs to be some discussion. But we’ve got to do something to really enhance football facilities and make sure they’re competitive, they’re comparable, to everybody else in the SEC. And that includes strength and conditioning, sports medicine, meeting rooms, coaches’ offices, all of those things.”

Initial reports called for a cost analysis in January, followed by up to one year to design the complex and at least two years to build it. The south end zone project could include additional premium seating, but primarily will update the facilities that the football coaches and players use on a daily basis.

“Gary just looks at it like, ‘Look, man, this is just the next step. We’ve just got to keep it going. Just keep building,’” Alden said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He’s always been like that. The minute we get this thing rolling I’m pretty confident he’s going to say, ‘When are we going to get that indoor facility?’

“He’s saying, ‘Where am I going to get the biggest bang for recruiting? Where’s the biggest ‘wow factor’ for recruiting?’ He believes, and I agree with him, we’re going to get a bigger ‘wow factor’ with an end zone complex than you are a new indoor facility. It’s something that’s a lot more attractive.”

When Alden met with the media in December, he described a second phase of the project at an undetermined date that would add an upper deck to the south side of Memorial Stadium that would close the bowl and connect the towers on the east and west sides, increasing the current capacity (71,168) by as much as 8,000 seats.

A big priority for Missouri in Rhoades’ tenure is increasing revenue. Part of that is through fundraising. Rhoades explained that he’s already trying to round up funds for the south end zone project and other athletic facilities upgrades before he’s even taken over the post in an official capacity.

But one of Rhoades’ key initiatives with revenue will be to sell more football tickets. Despite one of the smallest-capacity stadiums in the SEC, and back-to-back East Division title teams, Mizzou reached its maximum in just two games in 2014, against Georgia and Arkansas.

“That really needs to be our goal, to sell out every football game. It shouldn’t matter who we play,” Rhoades said on The Big Show.

“The main focus for us is we’ve really got to make ticket sales a priority for us. Not ticket operations, meaning taking ticket orders and fulfilling them. We’ve got to be an outbound company. We cannot be an inbound company. We’ve got to be an organization that we’ve got a ticket sales staff that we’re aggressively making phone calls. Getting people interested. Asking people to come to our games. Asking people to buy single-game tickets, family packs, season tickets. I think that’s an area of opportunity for us that we can really, really grow.”

From those comments, it sounds like Missouri’s new athletic director is committed to the hand-in-hand priorities of revenue generation and facilities upgrades to try to make the Tigers as relevant and competitive as possible in all sports, but especially within the SEC in football.