Following in the trend of hyping fans up for the new season—and after outgoing Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham appeared on it last week—UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts sat down with Jones Angell and Adam Lucas for an interview on the Carolina Insider podcast which was released on Friday. If you didn’t get a chance to listen, here’s the Roberts segment:
Fans really should sit back and listen to the interview, as they covered a lot of information about the future of Carolina. Roberts clearly has set himself with an eye on the future of the university, even going so far as to discuss working with the town of Chapel Hill for affordable housing since with more students, they need more staff and that staff would like to actually live in Chapel Hill.
The most notable thing discussed, though, was the discussion about the plans for where the men’s basketball team plays.
Roberts seemed to gingerly be making the case that building a brand new arena for the men’s team is likely going to be the direction where everything goes. He doesn’t say it explicitly, but when you listen to what he laid out as the problems with the current Smith Center and take that in with the comments from Cunningham earlier in the week, it doesn’t take a huge leap to see what their preference would be.
Of particular note is that Roberts cited the cost for just replacing the roof at the Smith Center at $80-$100 million. That’s an eye-popping figure, and Roberts noted with Lucas and Angell that “as you know” there are enough leaks that require buckets to be put out when it rains.
That particular number is the first one to have been released to give fans some idea of just how difficult a full renovation of the Smith Center would be. Consider that the Lenovo Center where NC State and the Hurricanes currently play just received $300 million for their renovation and that arena was built with the structure in place for the extra revenue that UNC lacks. It’s hard not to see that the case is being laid out that in the long run the “cheaper” option—and also the one that will bring in more revenue—would be to build up an arena from the ground up on land the university already owns.
The Smith Center currently has zero luxury boxes to sell to well-heeled alumni and businesses, their capacity to carry alcohol is limited, there is one concourse for all 20,000+ fans to walk, the restrooms are too small and need expanding, and students are crowded out of most of the best seats thanks to the agreements made about how the original building would be funded. On top of that, anyone who has tried to get to the Smith Center for a game knows how much of a nightmare parking is, and there’s only so much the school can do to alleviate it.
Cunningham and Roberts have been very careful about not stating a preference, as they know there’s a real strong contingent of alumni that would prefer to keep the arena on campus. Roberts noted that a decision on the next steps should be coming by “the end of the year,” and so when you take all of this information together it’s pretty clear what they are going to be pushing for. Why spend $100 million on just a roof when you could build everything you need from the ground up?
The only question is how long before they start making that case publicly.