On GB at the Kress: I like Rob's contribution "some have suggested." He suggested lol.
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Sorry I didn't get back to you guys sooner, I saw someone on this thread wanted my take on things and I've been busy. If you're interested and have a couple hours to kill, Tony Paulis and I put out our monthly summer podcast (
link here) and the first two hours deal exclusively with the arena. You might not want to listen to the third segment as we take a couple fun jabs at GB concerning Kelderman (nothing anyone here wouldn't chuckle at).
Basically, this move could go one of two ways. Either this is a temporary situation that helps us financially get ready to play basketball in a brand new or drastically renovated Klotsche Center (Loyola's Gentile Arena would be an example) or this is a semi or permanent solution that Andy Geiger feels is the smart move financially for a program that shouldn't have high aspirations anyways since he's spent the last 30 years in the high-major world.
The biggest concerns floated on our board concern the latter. I was worried about it until I listened to Andy Geiger's interview on 1250 WSSP here in Milwaukee on Wednesday, where he basically stated that the first order of business is to get a brand new practice facility built for basketball and then get started on a convocation center for the university.
At the end of the day, our situations are very different. Take the facilities themselves - the Resch Center, despite the difficulty a newcomer has in finding floor-level bathrooms (I still go up to the 2nd floor to take a leak), is a vastly superior game facility to the U.S. Cellular Arena. It was built for hockey like the Bradley Center, but because it's much smaller than the BC it doesn't suffer from sight line issues in basketball. The Cell, on the other hand, is just a great place to watch a game of basketball. It may sound like a compliment, but arenas are supposed to be more than that. The Resch Center has better concessions areas, better bathrooms, very nice suites, the only thing as far as "game experience" that I would say is better at the Cell is the video scoreboard. The Resch's center-court video board is putrid for 2012, and should be a focus for fundraising efforts in the future. But that's it. The Cell has a better scoreboard, a better entrance atrium, and that's it. The Resch's pro shop, which is too small and should be expanded, exists, therefore it's better than anything the Cell has.
The situations around it are also different. The Cell is shadowed by its replacement, the Bradley Center, literally across the street. The Resch IS the replacement for the Brown County Arena. Basically, us playing at the Cell would be like if you played at the Brown County Arena, St. Norbert's were a D-I private powerhouse who played in the Resch and the Packers had their own NBA franchise in the Resch as well. That's another huge reason we needed to get out.
In the end, Green Bay's disadvantages are in its limits as a university. It's just too small - 6,000 students is not the size of a public athletics powerhouse. My opinion has long been that the Phoenix department has done so much more in proportion to their resources as any school in the conference has with theirs, including Butler. In that city, the Phoenix are the biggest basketball show in town, so they should be in the sports district with the biggest and best arena. Milwaukee is the third option for city residents in basketball alone. If we had our university in Green Bay, with 30,000 students and our $161 million endowment, we'd be an MVC school already. In fact, of all the cities in the conference, Green Bay is the city that most resembles MVC outposts like Omaha, Peoria, Wichita, Springfield, and Evansville.
But we're not, and we'll never be at that Big East level. And that's OK. As long as we understand and accept that we'll never rise to be Marquette's level, we can focus on being the best program we can in a city that has many sports options. That's why you often see us bring up football. We'd finally be "first" in something, as long as we make sure we schedule football games far away from Bucky in time slot.
The funny thing is that the Cell's greatest strength is something that they never sold in any way. It was the home of MU's 1977 national champs, the Bucks NBA championship team, there were concerts of many great acts there - Beatles, Beach Boys, Elvis, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, I mean literally, go check out the wikipedia page, it's like a who's who of bands. Hell, even one of WWE's seminal moments happened right where the student section stands at the Cell - the 1996 King of the Ring, where Stone Cold Steve Austin stood and gave his famous "Austin 3:16" speech.
And they sell none of it. If you walk through the front doors, you'd think that the Cell and the Resch had similar histories. But the Cell doesn't sell it, so the arena will forever sit as a sterile shell, and the Resch will always be a better facility because the Cell chooses to stack up against it on things that it just doesn't come up to.
Don't take what I said earlier about the university as an affront, I didn't mean it like that. My point is simply that being the big, national public school with the exponentially higher endowment allows Milwaukee much more room for error in athletics. We can just afford more missteps than Green Bay can. If GB had gone through many of our same problems over the last decade, I don't know if the program would be what it is today. We, on the other hand, have all this crap go wrong, and we still make it to the front of the line for our acceptance speech for the McCafferty Trophy.
It all comes down to what we afford. Milwaukee would be worst in the conference for "Bang for your Buck" if UIC wasn't so god-awful. Highest budget in the conference?! YIKES!
But Milwaukee can afford a lot. Milwaukee's money is at a very good level for the Horizon League. It allowed us to snatch up Green Bay's coach despite the fact that Green Bay has been a better soccer program since Louis Bennett left MKE for Marquette. I just hope that if and when Rob Jeter departs, Brian Wardle is on our short list. Sorry, but if you were in my position, you'd see how awesome that idea would be lol.
Geiger is doing what he came here to do. Sort out our shit. He's been shaping people up, kicking out the bad eggs, placing expectations on people for their jobs. He's moved men's basketball back to campus in preparation for a major facilities project, one that this school has never attempted in athletics. He's cut out the major, idiotic lease with the Cell by not renewing it, and he's preparing to change the culture of college athletics and its relationship with the UWM community by placing the big show, men's basketball, directly on campus. If Geiger succeeds at his directives, I'm prepared to call him one of the top 5 AD's of all time.
Anyone who can fix our mess would deserve that honor.