[StoOgE]

What the hell is going on in here?

Austin's skyline is not the only thing "Major" about the city - our GDP increased by 50% from 2010 to 2018 and while we don't have stats yet I would not be shocked to find that we've come close to doubling our GDP since 2010.

Our population growth is off the charts. Our per capita income is in the top 20 nationally.

The idea that Austin is an outgrown college town is a though stuck in the late 90s. It's simply ceased to be the case and pointing to legacy institutions like the Spurs (who only exist because of a merger of a minor basketball league) or museums which are a function of how long a city has been large are silly.

Yes, Austin has improvements the city needs to make to catch up to the sort of cultural and social institutions you expect of a city of our size and importance but acting as though we aren't a "major" city because you have arbitrarily set "has a zoo" or "has an MLB team" as the metrics that you measure a city by is extremely silly.

Also, I guarantee you hosting an F1 race and SXSW make Austin a much more "known" city internationally than Columbus, OH with a "big 4" sports team.

Austin will wind up with a major sports team (I would argue MLS' growth over the next decade will supplant the NHL nationally - though the NHL will regionally be dominant in parts of the country) in the next 20 years. I would bet anything on it, but it won't mean that Austin is finally a "big city". Austin will have already been a big city. Pro sports teams are a scarce resource - there are limited numbers of them and moving legacy teams to new locations is not easy and expansions are not common in the "big 4" sports.