I listen to podcasts like i listen to music while I work out and in my car. So I dunno perhaps when you are posting on Clutchfans I assume you spend at least a few hours a week browsing around on here.
It was a serious question. I don't want to miss what I want to hear...if I put it on in the truck I'll just zone out and go on highway mode.
If you don't wanna listen about killing wolves with his bare hands or how big monkey balls are, skip to around the 20 minute mark. He the gets into football, why he won't let his kids play sports, why he wouldn't listen to a coach if they yelled or cursed at him, etc. Good interview. His talk about what really goes on in college football was great.
Texas got a commitment from the 2nd ranked high school kicker in the country. It's nice to see us investing in special teams after so many disasters. Some Tidbits from Chip Brown. Take them for what they are worth: DKR IMPROVEMENTS All of the new ribbon LED displays should be cool. They can do a lot of neat stuff with those. The new LED scoreboard will be great as well. It'll likely be sharper and brighter but the display is only about 190 sq feet larger which isn't a lot when you are looking at it from so far away. A complete teardown and rebuild of the South Endzone is in the master plan but that is far out. It's likely a lower priority than the new basketball arena since they want to teardown the Erwin Center to expand the new Medical School. The new south end zone will just consist of a lower bowl and suites and won't mirror the north end zone. It's unlikely they could build a 2nd level since it would require a bigger footprint that might require the athletic facilities to be completely torn down. I doubt they need that much additional capacity. I think a lot of this has to do with adding additional better seating than just adding a lot more seats. The south end zone is typically reserved for the band and UT spirit groups. BETTER GAMEDAY EXPERIENCE HOOPS ARENA PRICETAG This definitely creates a problem for the city of Austin. It might lose the ability to host a lot of non UT events without a standard larger arena. It will also be even more difficult from non students to get to and park in a new arena that is on campus particularly because the light rail train that would have gone by failed a couple years ago. There has been a lingering question of what to do with an increased hotel tax with a needed convention center expansion getting the most emphasis by outside groups as oppose to building a new arena or partnering with UT for a bigger arena. I'm torn because I see the need for both. The city would benefit greatly from expanding the convention center but you want people to have the opportunity to see a lot of cool touring acts in a big arena. Renovating and expanding the Travis County Expo arena is also on the table but that is so far away. Arenas are typically very close or reasonably close to the city core. I would love for the city to build a standard nice arena that most cities have but without the possibility of ever getting a regular tenant like a NFL or NBA team, it raises the question of if they could fill it with enough events during the year. Austin's minor league hockey and basketball teams do not draw nearly enough fans to justify an arena like that. It would have been cool to build it on the Austin American Statesman land which is being shopped to developers or next to the domain. You have the kind of commercial development in shops, restaurants and bars to support a big arena like that. Rockrose street at the domain is pretty cool. There is also Metro Rapid bus service to the Domain and you'll see express service down the new toll lanes of MoPac to get you across the city to the domain/north austin very quickly. That is if it is ever finished. I know this is more Austin stuff than UT but no one really dug the Austin thread I made in the hangout since it wasn't about cool stuff like music. The austin sub reddit is just so toxic. D'Onta Foreman bought a new Maserati sports car shortly after declaring he was leaving Texas early to enter the NFL Draft. This tends to be a bigger concern for running backs who tend to be on the decline by the time they are eligible for a 2nd NFL contract. I'm sure VY has talked to him and other players about the dangers of mixing finances with people in your personal lives as well as taking out big loans.
@Buck Turgidson , after the football talk it gets veeeerrrryyy boring. I usually love Rogans podcasts all the way through but that got kind of painful.
Nice writeup. I really like the scoreboard switch to LED, improved sound, better video, less ads, better WiFi, and microphones on the Longhorn Band. I am not at all impressed by Plonsky; she is a shill related to the bureaucratic elite that is stale and needs to be completely removed. I don't think you can put an arena on the Austin American-Statesman land because the city of Austin as a whole is not invested in UT basketball. In my opinion, UT basketball has only been popular in Austin among the UT crowd/people near UT. It would be selling out to the corporate side of things for money that has not worked in UT's favor. Putting it on campus and focusing on basketball is the best way for the basketball program to get a good atmosphere with better visibility. Austin is not a first-tier city for arena concerts and events, regardless of what people might say. A lot of the issue might be because of transportation, where the local government continues to crap the bed. $800 million is wasted on sidewalks and bike lanes when new roads, interstates, light rail, and bus systems all need improvements.
If you don't build the roads they will not come. Until they do come and traffic starts to get as bad as Bangkok.
Yep. Hoops at the Erwin has really never been popular in Austin among anyone (except in the rare amazing years). Student turnout is routinely terrible. It's a boring place that's hard to get to for 88.6% of the people in Austin. Because there's no place to have them. This is the elephant in the room. The only way a site at the Statesman would work is if there was quick easy rail/bus service from campus and parking lots along 35 (that are actually easy to get to without driving around in circles) with shuttle service. I don't see that happening. As far as lamenting the lack of "new roads, interstates, etc..." that train left the station about 20 years ago when I was a student. Nobody wanted to plan for the future and now that city is a cluster**** of overgrowth.
An arena on the Statesman land would be all-around terrible. Any event that coincided with the end of the work day would create a traffic jam of epic proportions on the Congress bridge/Riverside all the way to I-35. South Congress itself is already bad enough with the tourist activity, adding an arena to that mix is asking for trouble. I can see UT being opposed to a concert-hosting arena (unless they get their cut of course) if it's anywhere near student housing. Crowds leaving and snaking through campus on any given evening could be bad news for congestion and safety.
Herman with another big time flip in Caden Sterns. #2 safety from Texas committed to LSU back in November but did an official visit last weekend. Sterns is the 39th ranked player in the nation and only Top 10 player from Texas currently committed to a school. Herman currently sitting at #10 in team rankings, tops in the Big 12. Big turnaround the past few weeks.
Correct, everything sucks. But there's little dispute that work traffic getting to and from the bridges downtown is some of the worst in town.
I agree that UT basketball really isn't on the radar to the city. Any arena would likely have to be separate to the small arena UT wants to build on campus. I think a new arena would have to focus on attracting bigger events that you could find in any other city however there is no chance of attracting an anchor tenant like a NBA or NHL team. That plan also died with the last rail vote. I really like the idea of building an arena next to the domain with all the shopping, eating, and new rockrose street but that would have to be a city use arena with a separate UT basketball arena on campus. This isn't close to likely but one can dream. I really don't like changing the main access corridor for an arena from 15th/Enfield to MLK. 15h is designed to handle a much higher capacity, moves more rapidly and has continuous access to Mopac. MLK's dead end at Lamar would create more traffic on that side of town from people attempting to go to games or add traffic to side streets trying to get from 15th to MLK. I guess you would want to build or license garages on 15th and have people walk over instead of planning on MLK to be a major access point. That's not a super accurate assessment on the last mobility bond. I believe almost 500 million is going to road work. Some overpasses, road extensions and a lot of work fixing roads to make the traffic move better. People incorrectly correlate adding more lanes with lowering traffic but it tends to be a lot of other factors which slightly slow traffic many many times. The addiotn of overpasses on 360 will make a HUGE difference to west austin transit for example. There is other money that goes toward sidewalks but cities need sidewalks. They complement public transportation and make it more likely people will use them because they can walk from the stop to wherever they are doing. Austin has an embarrassing shortage in sidewalks. Bike lanes are also important to help mobility and they help make a difference in getting cars off the road along with a lot of other smaller things that come together to make a bigger picture. If you are interested, Sidewalks: 38 million, Safe Route to Schools: 28 Million, Bikeways: 100 million, Urban Trails: 26 million, Fatality Reduction Projects: 15 million, Corridor Improvements(Sections of North Lamar,Burnet, Airport, East MLK, South Lamar, East Riverside, Guadalupe, Slaughter/William Cannon): 482 Million, Regional Mobility Projects (bigger corridors like 360: 101 million with upwards of half a million from the region/state. A lot more would be needed to do all of the work on the corridors but it was hard enough to pass this mobility bond. The mayor had to fight tooth and nail with the council to do a 700 million bond as oppose to 300 but the people in Austin approved it overwhelmingly. You can't put all the money in a bond towards just 1 part of transit or it won't pass a vote. They learned that with the light rail vote where everyone in the city core voted for it and the suburbs voted against it. The money also puts funds to figuring out how to fix roads in south austin like Slaughter and William Cannon. I-35 work has already started in South Austin and that will slowly move its way north past Oltorf and to Riverside. Austin south of 71 is some of the worst I have ever seen. Agree. As I mentioned above, it was dependent on light rail traveling through downtown, campus, the middle of austin including what will be a very populated airport blvd corridor and connections to the existing redline for access to east austin, north lamar and northwest austin. People in Austin don't understand population density as it relates to light rail and the opportunity to focus new development on an empty corridor to stop the population spread across all random parts of Austin. I think they would be opposed to it if the city doesn't pay for any part of the arena to make it big enough to attract major acts. Austin is a major entertainment city and could get more acts if it had a standard arena but the Erwin Center isn't that and neither will a 12,000 arena. Sorry for all the info. I enjoy stuff like this. Local politics and civic projects like what is going on at the airport has always interested me.
All good news. Hope we can deliver on the field and keep him. It seems like more of Herman's commits are talking about the school while Charlie's commits talked about Charlie. I definitely like the former. It's very apparent that Herman is more like Mack in pushing kids to commit early as oppose to Charlie who would tell them to wait. It's also an example of the kids buying into what Herman is selling. I think his commitment to improving the program facilities is a part of that. Kids won't commit because they have a TV on their locker but the wide array of improvements that Herman is pushing for makes it feel like the program is getting better even if a game hasn't been played. The new media guys have probably made a great impression with all the edited/vfx stuff they put on twitter. Kids like that ****.
Sorry for the triple post, I forgot about news of a possible plan to replace the arena at the Travis County Expo grounds with a new modern facility. It assumes that UT will build a smaller and more campus orientated arena and a new arena to be built at the existing grounds will take the place of the Erwin Center as Austin's primary event arena. It'll be located at the Travis County Expo Center in far far east Austin by Walter Long Park. They'll demolish the existing arena and build a new one along with an expo center which should take some pressure off Palmer and the austin convention center. Most people know the grounds as the host of the Austin Rodeo. It says the arena will seat 15,000 people but it's not clear in what configuration. I'm guessing it would be more for a concert configuration since you would have temp seating on the floor of the arena. They are also preserving public land for future hotels, restaurants and retail outlets. It might not be too crazy considering housing is moving eastward and it will really pickup once the 183 Highway between 290 and 71 is finished. http://www.austintexas.gov/department/walter-e-long-parktravis-county-expo-center-market-study ftp://ftp.ci.austin.tx.us/PARDPlanningCIP/Final%20TCEC%20Market%20Study%207-21-16.pdf
Spoiler My sidewalks comment obviously was exaggerated, but Austin is just so d*mn far behind every other large city in terms of transportation. The $700 million plan is like the government trying to put out a lot of fires without actually containing the blaze. Austin has massive systematic issues. Think about Austin as being similar to the traffic in Calgary and Portland but without a light rail system. You're definitely right about MLK not being able to handle the traffic load. The Domain would be nice, but Lamar/Burnet and the Mopac would be a disaster for anyone south of it. That's the problem: pretty much every main road in Austin is a disaster.
^^ I thought Austin does have light rail. Not sure anybody uses it, though. Light rail isn't going to solve Austin's problems. Neither will more bike lanes. They need some good old fashioned Houston-style freeways.
