KeaneyBlue - The URI Basketball Forum

https://www.boston.com/sports/boston-re ... -direction

I got an email from a friend who said he heard that the people putting up the stadium think URI is going to play football games there.
I am surprised to comment on this stadium concerning
1. State money again being spend on Private sports facilities while URI facilities in many areas are so lacking
2. URI Football has no intention of playing any home games 35 miles from the Campus in a baseball park.

With one of the primary reasons for keeping football at URI the crowds that come back to campus in those Fall weekends, this would be stupid. I prefer we have a simple updated football facility and attract fans to Kingston.

It makes sense if they plan to use the pawsox stadium as their potential FCS home in conference realignment talks.

When UConn finally realizes they are out of all the P5 conferences, adding Rhody, Umass to the AAC would be an ok backup plan. Add a couple non-football schools and the basketball in that conference would be really good. More east coast ties for UConn rivalries would be good as well.

I'm not sure I understand this idea.

If you truly meant to say FCS, we've seen that FCS football doesn't really matter in terms of conference alignment. Also, playing FCS games 40 minutes away from campus doesn't really make sense. Last year we were already under 4000 for average attendance. Take away the draw of having games on campus and moving the games from where your fan base is located to a place where you might not have a fan base only hurts the product more.

If you actually meant FBS, the new stadium is too small. They're talking about capacity around 9500 and I believe you still need to average at least 15,000 attendance per year. That says nothing about increased costs, the same fan base concerns playing 40 minutes away and it hardly being a sure thing as UMass has illustrated.