Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our often-weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
As promised, we visited the Moody Center last night. First time taking in a game there.
I have been to basketball games before. I have been to good basketball games before. I have been to nice basketball arenas before. And no, I’m not about to say the Moody Center is better than them. It’s not. It’s great, it’s wonderful, I have no complaints, but I’m not going to say it’s the best arena in the country or anything silly. Instead, the point we’re trying to make here is that if you have most recently attended a Texas Longhorns basketball game at the Erwin Center and you then attend a Texas Longhorns game at the Moody Center…it is a shocking experience. You might even get the bends.
The Erwin Center will always have a special place in our hearts. It was the host of three incredible NIT games in 2019, and Texas was kind enough those days to give me and my signs an entire section to myself for the price of one ticket.
But damn.
It was not a very good place to watch college basketball.
I’m curious if this was different in the days of Durant, but when I went—not just for the NIT, either—the word that came to mind was “vacuous.” I’m not sure that word means what I think it means, but it was the word on the mind. The place’s ceiling stretched to the heavens, but it was dark up top, and the darkness seemed to swallow any ounce of energy mustered on the court.
I bring up Durant because I can see, in my head, a packed Erwin Center being incredible. I can picture people in the near-literal nosebleed seats screaming their heads off and making it impossible for Acie Law to hear Billy Gillispie’s calls from the bench. But when we went there…whoa, did it feel vacant.
It’s a little astonishing that Texas closes the upper deck and puts up those video boards for games. They forfeit a lot of attendance by doing this. It does raise other ticket prices, but it’s definitely opportunity-costing Texas money. Money they presumably believe they’re making back down the line by building better basketball programs through building a better basketball environment. It’s a wild calculation when you spell it out: “We will give up money and let fewer people come to games so we can gain marginal crowd advantages and build a better experience for those there, and these benefits will translate to enough wins and enough long-term support and enough marginal gains in school spirit that this will benefit our university.”
It’s one thing to throw millions of dollars at the best coach you can find.
It’s another to throw a few hundred million dollars at an arena that will, alongside other benefits (the concerts), give you these gains in marginal ways.
You can’t say Texas doesn’t care about winning.
