UNT hosting Rice at the SuperPit: North Texas v Rice Preview

The Super Pit

After introducing the Phog last Friday for the game at Kansas, its time to talk a little about the UNT Coliseum, the Super Pit.

Built in 1973, it seats 10, 036. It has hosted the Southland and Sun Belt Conference tournaments a couple times. It is named ‘Super’ because its predecessor was called the ‘Snake Pit’. The bigger, better, newer one carried on the name.

The old Men’s Gym was called the snake pit either because of the snakes that would sometimes sneak in and/or because of the crowd. Personally, I like the second version rather than the one that seems like UNT has a leak problem.

The Super Pit looking docile

The UNT athletics site has a nice little breakdown of the game. Some interesting tidbits:

-UNT is 56-11 since 2006-07 at the Super Pit.
-The TTU crowd was 7,105 — the fifth largest in UNT history.
-Rice’s first trip to the Super Pit

So what has Rice done? 

Well, this. That is to say, three wins and a loss. They didn’t do much last year. They managed only eight wins in the campaign and 23 losses (including one at home to the Mean Green 64-62) but they had youth on their side. You want to look out for Arsalan Kazemi. He played on the Iranian national team and averaged 12 a game, including 14 against the US team. He is big, gets rebounds and can shoot.

So what happens if we win?

This is another non-conference game so not much. UNT really should win this game, as they are deemed to be pretty good (they are) and senior-laden. Rice has some young talent and is looking to break through this year. That kind of matchup can be dangerous if North Texas underestimates them, but you can look for North Texas to out-experience them. What does that mean?  Well, an experienced team won’t turn the ball over easily, takes good shots, and won’t get rattled in crunch time.

Last I heard, UNT is favored by like ten.

If we lose?

Well, for all the reasons stated above it would suck but not damage us too terribly. There will probably be some hand-wringing and some overreactive freak-outs by the fan-base. It would not look good and would place even more importance on us doing really well during conference play.

Other stuff:
SI had an article on the old Snake Pit.
This guy came to the Texas Tech game and loved it.