FanHouse In the Stands: From the UNC Student Section for Carolina/Kentucky

Believe it or not, FanHouse writers are fans first. This year, we're bringing our cameras with us into the games and chronicling the exciting minutiae of attending sporting events. And we're calling it "FanHouse in the Stands."

When UNC's football team choked away a second half lead at Maryland on Saturday for a 17-15 loss that all but eliminated them from contention for an ACC championship and BCS Bowl this year, I immediately got a phone call from a friend, taunting me with, "What? Basketball season starts and the football team just packs it in? Is that how it works down there?"

That's not really fair to a football team that's made big strides under Butch Davis this year, but in the minds of most people in Chapel Hill it's probably true. The day that the online lottery for student tickets opens up, conversation on campus immediately turns to basketball. Yesterday, I ventured out of the cave that they keep us grad students in and on to the main undergrad campus for lunch. Even in the cold weather, the campus was buzzing for the Kentucky game. Luckily for me, I managed to score some tickets for last night's game in the student lottery. Luckily for you, I brought my camera.

As I mentioned distribute student tickets at UNC via an online lottery. Every student that's interested puts their student ID number in to the lottery for each individual game, then waits for e-mail notification. A week ago, I found this in my inbox:

Yes! Being randomly selected is awesome! The next part of the process is actually getting the tickets and getting assigned an entry "phase." I won't bore you with the details, but they stagger the randomly selected students by randomly restricting entry times. The people with "Phase 1" tickets get the best seats, if they're willing to show up two and a half hours early for the game. The earliest time I was allowed in to tonight's game was 7:30. My friend and I rolled in at about 7:45. And these were the best available student seats
You can see that the regular seats are empty, but the student risers are full. And look closely. Do you seen anything else?

It's Bobby Knight's green sweater and pink polo! And Digger Phelps' silver hair! and Jay Bilas's oddly trapezoidal head! With some serious time to kill (tip off time was 9 PM), I headed to the in-house Chick-Fil-A to get some dinner because I'm a grad student and getting to the Dean Dome at 7:30 means that I didn't get to go home or even have time for food before the game started. Most of the other people in the stands at that time were not grad students. They spent the time before the game differently.

I swear those aren't mine, Mom. I miss being an undergrad.

If you've never been inside the Dean Dome, it's a bit unique in a way that you'd never pick up on TV. There's not a central scoreboard. Instead, there's a bank of speakers over the middle of the court and a giant screen in each corner of the arena. It's still something I'm not entirely used to.

And if you're curious, that huge bank of blue banners is ACC Championships (and that's only about half of them ... suck on that, Duke). At Duquesne (where I did my undergrad), we had a banner for NCAA appearances. With five years listed.

I think one of my favorite parts about getting to the game as early as having student tickets requires is getting to see how ludicrous the pre-game stuff is. When we got there, the players were all hanging around the court, shooting around, stretching, etc. Then they went into the locker room, then the band played, then the players ran back out and everyone cheered. THEN, they went back into the locker room, the PA guy mades some announcements, they showed a video of the team in the tunnel, the band played again, and the team ran out again. I'm not kidding or exaggerating at all. I'm going to post two pictures below. One of them was shortly after we got to the game. One of them was after they went back in to the tunnel once and ran out with some fanfare. I challenge you to tell me the difference.


The difference? Not much other than that dude's head in front of me, really. Sitting in the student section is fun, but when you've been on campus for over 14 hours, having to stand the whole game gets annoying. Luckily, things got off to a good start.

I thought about finding Ashley Judd and consoling her. "I Got Slapped By Ashley Judd" is a much better hook for a post then "FanHouse in the Stands."

Anyways, the Dean Dome did fill up nicely, so if you're looking at the empty seats in those earlier pics and thinking about fairweather Carolina fans, I brought visual evidence:

At halftime, we got to watch a true artist at work. The guy that quickly sets up the chairs for Knight, Bilas, and Phelps.

Instead of taking pictures of a basketball game from a crappy angle way up in the stands, I instead tried to shoot some video to capture the mood in the Dean Dome. My camera doesn't pick up sound all that well and my cinematography leaves something to be desired, but ... Hey! Cheerleaders!

As for the game itself ... it was boring. Yeah, I said it. You can see from the screenshot I took that that the Heels had a 14 point lead nine minutes into the game. They ended up winning by 19 points. After about the point that the picture of the scoreboard was taken until the end, it was mostly UNC doing what they needed to do to stay comfortably ahead. Not exactly thrilling stuff for two of the most storied teams in college basketball, but except for Tyler Zeller's injury it was more or less exactly what UNC needed to do tonight without Tyler Hansbrough in the lineup.