I recently blogged about the NBA All-Star Game taking place at the soon-to-be built Dallas Cowboy Stadium in 2010. Now the NCAA tournament is following in its footsteps for 2014. Jacob Osterhout - of the College Sports Examiner - takes a look at the downside of using a football stadium to host college basketball games. Yes, more people see (I use this word loosely) the action...but does it subtract from the intimacy that makes college basketball so enticing? Osterhout thinks so:
"Do you know what it's like to watch a college basketball game in an enormous football stadium? It is the equivalent of watching a ping pong match in an airplane hangar...Last March, I was at Ford Field in Detroit -- capacity 80,000 -- covering the NCAA Midwest Regional Games for CBS College Sports. Sitting in press row, I had a great view of the action. So did LeBron James, who was sitting one row behind me. But as I looked around, I couldn't help but notice that the arena felt different, like all this space had killed the vibe. The student section barely existed. The band's music got lost in the cavernous space. And most of the fans were so far away from the court, they looked like dots."
"Do you know what it's like to watch a college basketball game in an enormous football stadium? It is the equivalent of watching a ping pong match in an airplane hangar...Last March, I was at Ford Field in Detroit -- capacity 80,000 -- covering the NCAA Midwest Regional Games for CBS College Sports. Sitting in press row, I had a great view of the action. So did LeBron James, who was sitting one row behind me. But as I looked around, I couldn't help but notice that the arena felt different, like all this space had killed the vibe. The student section barely existed. The band's music got lost in the cavernous space. And most of the fans were so far away from the court, they looked like dots."
