If you haven’t caught wind of this, UNC is trying to figure out what to do about the Dean Dome.
Opened in 1986, it replaced Carmichael Auditorium and in many ways was a huge improvement.
Carmichael, along with Duke’s Cameron, NC State’s Reynolds and Clemson’s Littljohn, were four of the ACC’s greatest pits (Maryland’s Cole Field House was too).
When it was opened, the sheer size of the Dean Smith Center (currently 21,750 but it may have changed over the years – we’re really not sure) was intimidating.
However, when Florida State won rather easily back in 1993 in their first ACC conference game, Sam Cassell said the Dean Dome had a “cheese and wine crowd, kind of laid back…it can’t possibly be like this at Duke and NC State.”
UNC has worked on the atmosphere over the years and it is better than it used to be. However, there’s no question the Tar Heels lost something in the move.
In a recent interview on Carolina Insider, A.D. Bubba Cunningham said that UNC “hasn’t made a decision” about what to do yet.
There are some real concerns. Replacing the roof could cost $80-100 million. There are limited spots for the big donors, the concourses are not all that wide, really, and there is at least one other issue of note.
When UNC chose the location, it was appealing in the sense that it was kind of by itself, and in 1986, maybe that made sense.
One look at Raleigh and the Lenovo Center though and you see where it was a long-term mistake. The area around the Lenovo Center has developed into a really fun area. You have restaurants and entertainment options and that’s impossible at the Smith Center. That, and very limited parking, make the place sort of unappealing.
The last time we gave UNC facility advice, it was to change the name of Mass Murderer Stadium as Kenan Stadium was named for Buck Kenan, who apparently participated in the 1898 Wilmington coup, where he was behind a machine gun on a horse-drawn carriage and apparently murdered quite a few people, mostly Blacks.
Not a good look for UNC. They resolved it by changing a plaque that honored William Rand Kenan Sr. to one that honored William Rand Kenan Jr.
In other words, they changed one letter and called it a day.
To be fair, in 2015 the Board of Trustees declared a moratorium on renaming buildings and the Kenan family has given a boatload of money to UNC over the years (Duke too, for that matter) and no one wants to offend a major donor. Even so, it was pretty amazing that UNC could not find a better solution (they may soon – with the money chase even more intense in college sports, the Chapel Hill braintrust is now considering selling naming rights to the place).
So we understand if they ignore us after that because we did kind of make a stink about that and we heard that that didn’t go over all that well.
Still, this is decent and sincere advice to our 15-501 bros.If you want to give UNC basketball a deadly homecourt advantage, do the following things:
- Build it somewhere where the students can walk to the gym. This is really important. They’ll still go if you don’t, but if you do, they’ll fight to get in.
- Do your very best to guild it somewhere where you can let other businesses build around it, a la the Lenovo/Carter-Finley arrangement in Raleigh.
- Cap it at no more than 18,500, which should give both great noise and size. Keep the roof relatively low. If you’ve ever been to both the Dean Dome and the Lenovo Center the difference is striking. Lenovo seats 19,750 but you never feel that far from the court. If you sit upstairs in Chapel Hill, you might as well watch on your phone.
- Put the students courtside and the skyboxes around the top. Stick 4K (minimum) screens in each suite, as large as possible, max out the tech, keep it flexible so that it can be easily updated when necessary, and don’t skimp.
- Consider cribbing the high wall from Maryland’s Xfinity Center. Their capacity is 17,950 incidentally. You might want to reduce the angle so you don’t get sued when people fall and get hurt like they have at Maryland, where it’s 35 degrees, but that Blue Wall would be the student section and a real advantage in the second half. Plus you could put more geezers courtside. It’s a win-win!
- Pay for good acoustics. If you make it easily accessible and the arena has great audio, then you won’t have someone like Steven Stills, who famously complained that Carmichael “sounded like the inside of a toilet bowl.” What you will have are people who will want to play there because today, bands make a lot more from touring than they used to. In fact, they have to because streaming revenue is not what you might think. A big arena on a big campus with nearly 80,000 students nearby in all the various colleges in and near the Triangle? You could really make bank on a place like that.
- Finally, getting back to Kenan. This seems like an easy solution that would not upset some powerful donors. Why not just rename it…the Kenan Family Stadium? It makes more sense than changing it from Sr. to Jr.