Can We Talk About Flying Into The Hub City?

The kicker for Oklahoma State University recently made headlines with a controversial statement.

The kicker for the OSU Cowboys called Lubbock a "sh*thole".  Now, he was probably going on about the way the fans treated our visitors, but it really got me thinking.

Visualize for a second, a person landing at the Lubbock International Airport, coming up the Interstate, then hooking it over on the Loop to Jones stadium. If that was all you ever saw of Lubbock, then yeah, a lot of that is firmly sh*thole territory.

Now I do need to back up and say over by the golf course is nice (in season), but even the nicer areas tend to look very remote. Once you head up the Loop towards Tech, things take on a pretty rough look.

The route I described does not give anyone a sampling of Lubbock, at all. As an example, when I first moved here it was to Union, Texas. Imagine waking up for a road trip in Union and thinking that's all that Texas was (not to dump on Union, but there wasn't a lot going on there in 1979).

I think some things could be done to give that route a better "Welcome To Lubbock" vibe. It could be anything from zoning the junkyards to somewhere else, to putting up billboards that somehow express that you aren't even really in town yet.

There are many parts of this town that are beautiful, modern, and very much something to show your guests;  the area coming in from the airport is not one of them.