re: MrSEC.com ranks SEC basketball arenas 1-14

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a whole lot more tickets wound up in ticket brokers' hands before the season even started and hence there will be less walk up.

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This seems to be getting worse at schools across the country. It is going to kill the donor arm of most schools if the donors can not get the better tickets after the donation than the scalpers can without a donation.

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The photographs don't do EITHER justice. You can't see how nice Reed Arena is and how shittastic G. Rollie White was. That upgrade was about 30 years overdue. The reason it was so long overdue will make you want to puke and laugh at the same time. We're REALLY glad to be in the SEC

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Yeah definite upgrade. Honestly for Mizzou its weird in that although our new arena is better in terms of sight lines, luxury, aesthetics et al, we probably sacrificed a better pure college basketball environment when we moved out of the Hearnes Center in 2004. It was old and boxy, but it was still pretty big even by today's SEC standards (and frankly would rank probably toward the lower middle of Mr SEC's list even today). It was designed like a pit, very vertical arena so the crowd was literally right on top of the players and court, which made it a loud and intimidating place. You couldn't see sh** from the upper decks cuz you were so high up (first time I realized as a kid I needed contact lenses was sitting in the Hearnes Center upper decks) but the akward design created a good college hoops feel to it like the Pit in New Mexico. And Mizzou forged like an 85% winning percentage over 32 years there as a result.

That's one thing that Auburn got right (at least for TV) is having the student section on the floor. The rest of the stadium is empty, but all you can see is the mostly packed in student section. It at least looks good for tv.

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There was a huge shake up in terms of priority seating and a lot of old timers, townies, university employees and such who had had their specific seats at our old Hearnes Center arena for years and years were bumped up, displaced etc.

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Which is the crowd that shows up and makes noise. If you take away employees and their friends / relatives from Vanderbilt it would show up in their attendance numbers. These are the folks without the cash, but they make the arena look viable on TV.

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Thus on top of just having a quieter lower level like UK's has become, we also have a much more rampant no-show problem amongst the high dollar seats than we ever did in the old arena.

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Big donors today are more corporate than individual. They only show up for the big games because it is the status symbol. While this may fill the coffers in the short run, it kills the next generation of fans. It may take 10 - 20 years from now to catch up, but it will catch up. Old school donors went to all the games and the secondary sports too, but this new group want the marquee games and don't care about the rest of the year.

Kentucky is the poster child of the future as Tubby had a home schedule worth the entire book. Now the schedule the chaff at home and play the big non conference games at neutral sites. Tubby played Izzo home and home and Rupp was rockin. This year they played in Chicago and the place was much quieter. To add insult to injury the season ticketholders no longer get option to buy the neutral games based on their priority points. These tickets now go to the professional scalpers (and blessed by the NCAA for a piece of the action) so why would donors want to give anymore.

Think of the lines for the movie Casino, and you get the bigger picture...

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The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over... In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it's like checkin' into an airport. If you order room service, you're lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it's all gone. You get a whale show up with four million in a suitcase, and some 25-year-old hotel school kid is gonna want his Social Security Number.

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When you ask folks for money you are in the service business and nobody is teaching the younger folks what real service is. When the baby boomer die off, all that donor money is going to dry up too. We are getting back to Rome where the folks in the Senators boxes were living large and the folks upstairs were bidding on the meat of the dead just to not starve.

Thompson Boling #1

Here is a pretty cool panoramic of the O'Dome from court level of the UF-UT game last weekend.

LINK

Outside the hump, I have only been to Tennessee's arena. I truly enjoyed it. Thats just checking it out on a football game day. I would love to be there during an actual game.

Coleman is unique as to there are way more seats along the sidelines compared to those along the baseline.
The court is turned 90 degrees to the long side of the Coliseum.

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Coleman is unique as to there are way more seats along the sidelines compared to those along the baseline.
The court is turned 90 degrees to the long side of the Coliseum.

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Go home, Bammer basketball arena designer,
You are drunk

Didn't we just spend around $6 mil renovating the Stegasaurus in order to "keep up" with the other schools in the conference? Talk about polishing a turd...



This is why I really don't blame Fox for recruiting poorly. Sure, if he'd play the AAU game it would help, but no top ranked basketball player is going to want to play for a team with, hands down, the worst facilities in the conference. Until the AD gets serious about trying to to build a competitive basketball program, we're going to continue to suck a massive amount of dong at this sport.