Alabama basketball fans waited a long time for a consistent winner.
A 15-year stretch that included two NCAA Tournament appearances before coach Nate Oats' arrival lasted too long to be easily forgotten, even by a fan base that just witnessed the first Final Four appearance in program history. In a few months, ahead of its season opener in early November, you can bank on the Crimson Tide garnering its third preseason top-10 ranking in the last 50 years. More than likely, it'll be preseason top-5 for the first time ever. Of course, preseason rankings won't be worth so much as a layup next March. But in Alabama's case, at least, it will speak to the jet fuel Oats has poured into the program's gas tank.
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That long wait for winning basketball, however, has a place in the equation in trying to understand why UA Athletics intends to sink $57 million into 56-year-old Coleman Coliseum when a new arena was already too far on the horizon to see. Because the investment is more about — no, make that all about — the athletes, not the fan experience. And what's good for the athletes is good for recruiting, which is, in turn, good for winning. The project's very name — the Coleman Coliseum Basketball Training & Player Development Facility Expansion and Renovation — offers full truth in advertising. When it likely becomes operational in 2026, Alabama's home crowd won't see a dime of that $57 million in seating or scoreboards or concessions or bathrooms.
It should expect, however, to see it on the floor.
And for a fan base that stomached this program staggering through more than a decade of NIT bids or, worse, no postseason at all, the product on the floor and the fan experience are largely one in the same.
When UA first announced tentative plans for a new arena in February of 2022, it was already non-committal about a target date for construction. That became even less clear when inflation pushed the price tag from $183 million to $250 million. And with the recent House vs NCAA lawsuit settlement that dawned revenue sharing with athletes — likely more than $20 million a year and sure to grow from there — big spending on new facilities in college athletics is certain to fall out of vogue. In the coming months and years, you won't see as many schools announce plans for eight-figure facility upgrades like this one, to say nothing of nine-figure new buildings. For Alabama, a $250 million arena has necessarily gone from the back burner to the top shelf.
There remains a recognition in UA athletic administration that Coleman is past its prime, and that the clock on its shelf life continues to tick. The clock on new arena construction now ticks at a much slower pace, and expensive Coleman band-aids do nothing to speed it up. But while the timetable on a new building is now more indefinite than ever, it's no less inevitable for the wait.
When Coleman is eventually razed, the planned annex won't be bulldozed, too; it will survive Coleman's demise for continued use. One of several possible sites for a new arena, when it was first proposed in 2022, was the Coleman parking lot. Consider that the most likely location, right beside a $57 million investment that the wrecking ball won't touch.
From that standpoint, the project makes even more sense.
Should a new building have been built long before inflationary concerns? Yes. Is Coleman's retirement overdue? Absolutely. It was built in 1968 at a cost of $4.2 million — the equivalent of roughly $38 million today — not as a basketball arena but as a multi-purpose facility.
The length of the wait on a new arena, at this point, can't even be calculated.
But in basketball years, waiting on a winner is the tougher grind.
Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on X.com @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Making sense of $57 million for Coleman Coliseum vs. a new arena
