East Lansing – Michigan State has received a historically large financial commitment from an East Lansing husband and wife that university leaders say position the school’s athletic department to become – and remain – one of the best in the nation.
Michigan State announced Friday a commitment of $401 million from East Lansing’s Greg and Dawn Williams, including a $301 million gift – making it, by nearly 10 times, the largest private donation in the university’s history.
The gift includes $290 million earmarked specifically for the athletic department. Another $100 million is an investment by the couple in the coming-soon Spartan Ventures initiative, which, among other interests, aims to significantly boost NIL offers for student-athletes.
The $290 million donation to MSU’s athletic department was the big seed that was used to launch Michigan State’s FOR SPARTA campaign, which was announced earlier this week, and has set an ambitious goal of raising $1 billion from donors, with plans to use that money to significantly upgrade the university’s athletic arenas, including Spartan Stadium and Breslin Center.
“This tremendous gift will serve as a catalyst to return Michigan State athletics to the top 10 athletic department that it can be and where it belongs,” Michigan State athletic director J Batt said in an interview with The Detroit News. “The vast majority of this will support FOR SPARTA. … And it really answers the question of if Michigan State athletics will be able to realize its ambitious goals.
“This answers the question emphatically: Yes.”
Batt and Williams told The News there are no set naming rights associated with the gift, and Batt said the gift isn’t being used to pay the $30-million-plus buyout for fired head football coach Jonathan Smith. That money, Batt said, is coming from other athletic department resources, including other donors.
Friday’s announcement, which took place on the floor of the Breslin Center, where Greg Williams regularly sits courtside for men’s basketball games, adds to an already big week for MSU athletics, after new head football coach Pat Fitzgerald was introduced Tuesday.
Greg Williams, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Grand Rapids-based tech and insurance giant Acrisure, met Fitzgerald on the tarmac at the Lansing airport on Tuesday morning, and sat near the front during Fitzgerald’s press conference later that day.
In an interview with The News, Williams said there have been discussions about the financial commitment and historic gift for several months, and the decision was made by the family in recent days. He said a big reason for the commitment: His comfortability with the new leadership at Michigan State, including president Kevin Guskiewicz, hired two years ago, and Batt, hired six months ago.
“You want to contribute in a meaningful way, and we’re fortunate enough that we’re in a position to do that,” said Williams, who founded Acrisure in 2005, and has seen it balloon to more than $5 billion in annual revenues. “This is something you don’t do without an awful lot of thought. And part of that is, we are aligning ourselves, personally, with the right people, the right causes, the right institution, and we couldn’t have any higher conviction about doing just that. We feel very good about the whole thing.”
Batt and Williams, in interviews with The News, didn’t specify how the money would be disbursed, other than Williams saying some will be short-term and some will be long-term. Some is expected to be a part of estate planning for Greg and Dawn Williams, both 64.
The donation will become the largest in Michigan State history, by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The previous record donation was from former basketball player Mat Ishbia, CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage and owner of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, who donated $32 million to the athletic department in 2021. The record before that was $30 million, donated by alum and real-estate developer Edward J. Minskoff in 2018, for the Eli Broad College of Business.
For the entire fiscal year 2024-25, Michigan State athletics took in $44 million, from 6,919 individual donors.
New athletics era
The gift couldn’t come at a better time for Michigan State, given the arms race that is college athletics, and given the athletic department’s money crunch – it has run a deficit in recent years, and is carrying a debt of more than $100 million.
“Their investment in both the university and the future of Spartan athletics reflects a bold, shared vision for excellence and innovation,” Guskiewicz said in a statement Friday morning. “This moment will have a profound impact on generations of Spartans, and we are honored by their confidence in MSU.”
The money isn’t just appreciated by Michigan State athletics, it’s much-needed, for a school that was among 16 in the Big Ten on board with the conference taking on a $2.4 billion investment from West Coast-based pension fund in exchange for a 10% stake in the league. That deal – recently paused and possibly dead without Michigan and Southern Cal on board – would have resulted in a cash infusion of more than $100 million per school.
The nine-figure debt Michigan State athletics is carrying includes a loan for the lion’s share of the first round of $20.5 million revenue sharing with student athletes, COVID relief loans, and a significant donor shortfall on the $26.7 million Munn Ice Arena renovation project, as well as personnel buyouts.
Smith, fired two years into a seven-year contract, will be paid through 2031; that money is offset if he finds employment elsewhere. MSU just signed Fitzgerald to a five-year contract worth at least $30 million, which could grow to an eight-year deal worth at least $54 million if he reaches multiple but attainable victory benchmarks in the incentive-laden contract.
MSU remains in litigation with former head football coach Mel Tucker, who is claiming wrongful termination as he seeks the $80 million remaining on his contract when he was fired. MSU also remains in litigation with Brenda Tracy, who is suing the Board of Trustees for allegedly mishandling her 2022 sexual-misconduct claims that led to Tucker’s firing early in the 2023 season.
Batt declined to get specific when asked by The News if this gift would be a cure-all for the department’s recent and serious money issues.
“What I would just say is that this represents a transformative moment for the future of Michigan State athletics,” Batt told The News this week. “However, for us to continue to drive forward and reach our rightful place as a top-10 athletic department, we need every Spartan in the Spartan athletic family to step up and follow Greg and Dawn’s lead, and do what they can to help us drive forward.”
The big focus of the $401 million commitment – there’s no meaning behind it being $401 million, as opposed to $400 million, Williams said, other than that’s what the needs called for during the family’s discussion with Guskiewicz and Batt – is football. Batt and Guskiewicz have made no bones about the fact that football is the engine for any big-time college athletics department, even one with a blue-chip men’s basketball program like Michigan State.
‘Incredible, inspiring’ gift
FOR SPARTA, a wing of the university-wide $4-billion capital campaign, will address the needs of all Michigan State teams, Batt said, but the most-significant renovations will be for 102-year Spartan Stadium, including the long-needed replacement of the east tower, after west tower renovations were finished and new scoreboards were installed before the 2025 season. There also are plans to upgrade Breslin Center, which opened in 1989. Renderings were released Tuesday.
The $100 million toward Spartan Ventures is considered a financial stake, or investment, and not a traditional gift. That will help launch that initiative, similar to one pioneered by Clemson of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Batt was hired away from Georgia Tech, also in the ACC.
Spartan Ventures is a third-party corporation that Michigan State announced in late October, and will launch mid-2026. Its focus will be generating revenues, via a non-profit, tax-exempt entity that also is designed to consolidate NIL opportunities for student-athletes. Michigan State will maintain compliance oversight of over the corporation, with a board of directors likely to be led by Guskiewicz. Spartan Ventures lifts some of the red tape by which public universities must abide.
Batt declined to be specific about Spartan Ventures when it comes to media rights or corporate partnerships, other than to say, “It’s simply helping us to modernize and optimize all of our revenue generating opportunities.”
Said Guskiewicz, in a recent interview with The News: “It will allow us to … bring a structure that looks like a private-sector, world-class (organization). Competitive advantages are going to come to us as a result.”
The additional $11 million from Greg and Dawn Williams will be a gift, to be used for academic and extracurricular initiatives, including the Spartan marching and pep bands, the Sparty program, the MSU Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and the Eli Broad College of Business’ Risk Management and Financial Insurance Program.
Greg and Dawn Williams are long-time Michigan State athletics donors, having previously donated more than $25 million, including a $10 million gift in 2021 that went toward the football building project. That project was completed and dedicated in 2024, and their names are on the Greg and Dawn Williams Lobby in the Tom Izzo Football Building. Fitzgerald was introduced in that lobby Tuesday.
Acrisure, which reportedly is planning an initial public offering (IPO) in 2026, has a lengthy resume of sports investments, especially when it comes to naming rights. Acrisure is the name on the stadium for the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers, and the coming-soon amphitheater in downtown Grand Rapids, among several other venues.
That’s business. Friday’s announcement was much more personal for Greg and Dawn Williams, who grew up together in Laingsburg, northeast of Lansing. Williams recalled attending his first MSU sporting event in seventh grade, on a school trip to watch men’s basketball at Jenison Fieldhouse – another building, opened in 1940, that will get significant renovations, after MSU recently scaled back its plans for the Spartan Gateway project, and scrapped plans for a new arena.
“When this first got discussed, there’s moments you have where my wife and I look at each other and say, ‘Are we really going to do this?'” Williams said. “And the more we talked about it and explored the whole thing, again, we just got more and more committed to the whole thing.
“The whole thing’s been exciting, and it’s the kind of impact that were looking to make.”
Batt, hired to replace former athletic director Alan Haller in June on a six-year contract that pays him more than $2 million a year, was Guskiewicz’s choice in part for his reputation as an elite fundraiser.
Batt has been an athletics administrator since 2005, at eight different schools.
He’s had his fair share of successes, but nothing quite like this.
“I would just say, incredible, inspiring, humbling, when somebody – Greg and Dawn – make that sort of commitment. It’s incredible,” Batt, whose department operates on a $192 million budget, told The News. “And that moment when they shared with us what they were going to do is probably one of the most incredible moments in my college athletics career, and something that I’ll never forget.”
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