Quote:
Originally Posted by the Genral
The Erwin Center is owned and operated by UT with no affiliation with the City of Austin so there's no need to "break" from the city. They, UT, are in the process of looking for a place to build a new arena to make room for the new medical facility planned for that spot. And there's no doubt the new arena will be anything but intimate. It will be big and state of the art. After all, this is UT where everything has to be world class. It also needs to be big enough to attract money making events, ie; concerts, circus, boxing, wwf, tennis ect...
The arena was built to replace the "intimate" Gregory Gym, and it is named after Frank Erwin, a UT Board of Regents member.
Although the Erwin Center is multi purposed, it was built to house the men's and women's basketball teams above all else.
I wasn't aware the city wants to build an events center btw.
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The FEC benefits the city of Austin by acting as our local events center. Neither you nor I knows anything about what Patterson plans to do. He's not DeLoss Dodds. He's not an orthodox guy. He wants to play football games in Mexico City for chrissake. Most of his career has been spent in the NBA, so he's a basketball guy. Surely, he has enough basketball knowledge to see that UT is not an NBA team and so the FEC is way too big. It's bad marketing to televise games where your arena is half-empty (if not 3/4ths empty). So, building another arena that's too large for our basketball team would be idiotic.
If you read by comment again, you'll see that I said "
If the city of Austin wants to build an events center". Obviously, Austin needs a local events center and the Erwin Center will be torn down sometime in the next 10 years.
If Texas goes their own, smarter route and builds a smaller arena (it's possible that they won't because they probably want the money that comes with hosting large events) then Austin will have NO CHOICE but to build its own events center. This would be the best outcome for both parties, IMO.
I'm just tired of seeing a mostly-empty arena for UT basketball games. It's embarrassing and bad for our image. This has more to do with the arena being too big than our fan base being too small.
Anyway, that won't matter this Saturday against Kansas because that game is sold out. But that only happens once a season if we're lucky.