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Remember the excitement of Moody reopening?

Well TCU had reopening of their Basketball arena today against Abilene Christian-scheduled to be televised by Fox Sports Southwest. [Un]fortunately technically difficulties meant no TV for first 1 1/2 hours. TCU only beat ACU (Division II?) by 11 before only 5,791(capacity 7,201)

http://www.killerfrogs.com/msgboard/ind ... ficulties/

ACU is now in the southland. FCS /d1 hoops

Better attendance than I expected against ACU with students home for break. It was my first look and the new stadium is nice (I'm sure no SMU fan would ever admit it lol). Anyway, we suck at hoops right now. No reason smu shouldn't have run us out of the gym.

Reed, are the TCU bigwigs happy with Johnson? In his fourth season at TCU, he doesn't seem to be doing much to improve the program, and I haven't noticed TCU landing any significant recruits lately. Josh Parrish is a nice player, but I don't think he's a program changer. Just curious if he is feeling any heat?

Honestly, with the talent TCU has, it's amazing that they don't win more games.

CalallenStang wrote:Honestly, with the talent TCU has, it's amazing that they don't win more games.

Need to get rid of the injury bug

It still looks like a Soviet era concrete dump inside the seating bowl.

skyscraper wrote:It still looks like a Soviet era concrete dump inside the seating bowl.

There just wasn't anything to work with. No matter what you did, it wasn't going to work. Implosion was the only credible answer.

That is a hilarious thread! My key takeaways:

The mis-spelling of the name of one of TCU's greatest BBall players at the top of the arena with the other "greats" is classic.

The fact that they rented a High School band to come in and play their arena opener - which evidently came with dancers of the more exotic variety.

The fact that they barely beat one of the worst teams in college hoops.

TCU BBall sucks.

Johnson deserves at least one more year IMO. They've been playing in that FWISD dump for a year and a half now. He's only been able to recruit based on project drawings and a "vision" for the program. Plus he's trying to recruit bball players to a hard-core football school located in a hard-core football town. . .not easy. Strategic patience is a necessity for TCU hoops.

LA_Mustang wrote:Reed, are the TCU bigwigs happy with Johnson? In his fourth season at TCU, he doesn't seem to be doing much to improve the program, and I haven't noticed TCU landing any significant recruits lately. Josh Parrish is a nice player, but I don't think he's a program changer. Just curious if he is feeling any heat?

I think he is feeling a moderate level of heat. A lot of people (myself included) don't think he is the right guy but I also think you have to give him at least one season with the new facilities. The guy has been recruiting to a HS gym so the results should not be surprising. Our style of play is boring and that doesn't matter where you play your games.

I really think that injuries to Washburn and Williams (2 starters) derailed the season before it started. With those guys I think we have enough to make postseason play. Without them we will win 4-6 games in conference and finish under .500 based on what I have seen. We do have a couple of promising younger players for a change (Trent and Brodziansky) but we lack athleticism. We must have the fewest dunks of any college bball team in the country over the last 4 years.

As for the arena...it is a vast improvement. Short of imploding and starting over, they did a great job.

So what did they actually do besides add a new video board? I know the seating bowl was reconfigured down low to be less dumb. Looks like a big flying saucer.

Completely gutted and new

Bergermeister wrote:

skyscraper wrote:It still looks like a Soviet era concrete dump inside the seating bowl.

There just wasn't anything to work with. No matter what you did, it wasn't going to work. Implosion was the only credible answer.

ReedFrawg,

Was there any serious discussions about implosion, because I agree the core 'circle' design is unfixable.

Now that you've dropped so much coin on DMeyer (someone posted $92M) you're stuck with it for the next 25 years.

Complete opposite of what Coach Doh told me about Moody. "Don't change the bowl, it's perfect".

My guess? TCU did not have the funds to tear down and rebuild. I assume the AD was able to get an idea of how much he could raise before the project went public. Maybe the support was just not there for basketball. I am sure the sagging oil economy did not help.
TCU obviously has access to funds or they could not have rebuild Amon Carter the way they did.
That's my opinion