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Hello and welcome to another edition of Cus Words Sports!
I wasn’t going to write a newsletter today, but I couldn’t resist after Ohio State announced it is conducting a survey regarding future plans for Ohio Stadium:
“A study has been commissioned to gather feedback from the Ohio State community to help determine future courses of action. We need to listen, learn and gain insight from as many sources as possible. We are looking for guidance and are only just beginning a journey along a path toward providing our guests the ultimate gameday experience.”
Oh yeah, they’re gonna do the same thing for the Schottenstein Center.
That’s what put me over the top because I’ve got a lot of feelings about the Schott — particularly how much it sucks:
It’s too big
The acoustics are bad so it doesn’t hold sound
The sightlines are poor
The seats aren’t comfortable
Otherwise it’s great….
I strongly believe this is a majority opinion, but feel free to correct me if you feel differently.
There is a certain chicken-or-the-egg aspect here as there just probably aren’t enough diehard Ohio State basketball fans to fill a 19,500-seat arena, but if the team was consistently winning the Big Ten and making deep runs in March perhaps everything would be better. (Still not great, but better.)
I tend to doubt that when looking at attendance numbers for the Thad Matta era, but I can’t completely rule it out.
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So what should Ohio State do about the Schott?
My grand idea is they need to give up on playing basketball there.
Ohio State has done multiple major renovations, and I’m sure they are considering another.
They’ve managed to upgrade the practice facilities and the concourse and that all is very nice.
The actual basketball arena part just can’t be fixed because the problem is physical more than anything: It’s too big and doesn’t hold sound, as already mentioned.
Part two of this plan: Revive St. John Arena.
The 13,000-seat palace built in the 1950s is currently out of commission because the scoreboard went kaput.
I’m sure it would require a great deal of work to get the building back online, but tearing it down would also be very expensive — and they can’t do that anyway until they build a new indoor track to replace French Field House and a new ice rink because the mechanical guts that keep those places running are inside SJA.
Like I said, they are gonna spend a fortune either way so why not do a thing that people will actually want.
A renovated St. John Arena — and if you’ve been to UD Arena in the past five years you know what they are capable of doing these days with enough money — would be awesome. It would be full, loud and a hot ticket that helps both basketball teams actually have a home court advantage.
In this scenario, there is no need to tear down the Schott. They maintained two arenas for 20 years. Keep them both now. Keep the fancy locker rooms and the practice facility. Keep holding concerts and monster truck rallies and Disney On Ice (the only even that’s actually good there) on that side of the river but play basketball at St. John Arena.
Also: This would be the easiest fundraiser of all time.
I’m sure there are downsides I have not considered, but I also don’t care.
This is what they should do. It’s the best option of any out there. It just takes a little vision…
Now, what about the Horseshoe?
To be honest, my last game as a fan at Ohio Stadium was the 2002 Michigan game (not a bad way to go out).
I started in the sports information department the following year when I was a junior, and I’ve been in the press box ever since. That means I don’t have great perspective on the fan experience, but I would love to hear your thoughts.
I don’t doubt much “modernization” could stand to be done from top to bottom since the place is 100+ years old and was last majorly renovated at the turn of the century.
The fan experience seems to be lacking as the atmosphere went into decline a few years after the 2002 national championship.
I’ve always felt that drove fan interest to another level and made it more of a wine and cheese crowd that is less into getting up and cheering at every opportunity, but that is just my perception.
(No doubt it costs a lot more to get in now, though they did add a lower cost tier a couple of years ago.)
As things started to go downhill around 2010, the athletics department did the predictable and absolutely wrong thing of bringing over the terrible game day management activities it has already used to destroy the atmosphere at basketball starting in about 2005.
Minor-league baseball promotions and timeout commercials that do everything but encourage the crowd to actually, like, cheer and stuff.
(To be fair, in the last decade or so the timeouts in football have grown more frequent and longer so it does feel like sometimes they need to fill the time with something, so I’m not totally sure what the answer is there.)
I felt like there was less intrusion from the scoreboard/PA last year, and the atmosphere was better so hopefully that continues.
What do you think?
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And look for another edition or two of Cus Words Sports later this week as spring football winds down…
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