Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

The Sixth Man: Fan Performance Crucial to On-Court Success

It doesn’t help when your team misses eight free throws or when it shoots a miserable 38.5 percent from the field. It doesn’t help when it takes bad shots or commits untimely fouls. None of those things make it easy to win a game, but they aren’t the reason we lost to Syracuse on Thursday night at Verizon Center. It wasn’t the team’s performance that deserves criticism – it was the fans’.

I`ve been going to basketball games since I was a toddler. I’ve seen a lot of bad games, a lot of bad calls, a lot of bad attitude, but I’ve never seen such bad spectating as I did on Thursday. Pathetic doesn’t even begin to tell the story. As Hoya fans, we simply never showed up. Don’t get me wrong, there were 19,976 people in attendance according to ESPN.com, but, emotionally, the crowd was out to lunch. Even for D.C. – where nobody seems to care about sports – it was appalling to see how many people spent the game looking at their watches, phones or BlackBerrys. Despite the fact that Dick Vitale and Tony Kornheiser – arguably the two loudest and most obnoxious people in the entire sports world – were in attendance, Verizon Center felt unnervingly more like a nursing home than it did the site of a game between two top-10 teams.

Frankly, I can’t quite get my head around it. It’s not like there wasn’t plenty of excitement leading up to the game. Students waited in line – some of them arrived more than six hours before tip-off – passionately heckling Syracuse fans as they passed by. But once the game began, it was like somebody flipped a switch. Aside from the occasional obscenity directed toward the Syracuse team or the refs, and the uncoordinated cheers (don’t even get me started), the Georgetown crowd was almost universally disengaged until almost the nine-minute mark of the second half.

Is that really how we wanted to represent ourselves at one of our last home games, especially against our archrivals? I should hope not. Are we really so spoiled that the possibility that we might not be dominating our opponents for all 40 minutes of the game is inconceivable, or, alternatively, so devastating that we give up all hope and lose any interest in the game?

It is a cop-out to blame the officiating as the cause of the fan disinterest. While I dislike Jim Burr as much as the next guy, and while I like to joke that the arena is called Verizon Center because of all the missed calls, the fact is that we’re often the beneficiary of those misses. Were there some egregious mistakes on Thursday night? Of course. But look at the box score. Georgetown was called for four fewer fouls and committed eight fewer turnovers. Even after the calls against us that we clearly deserved, the Georgetown can-do-no-wrong mentality was out in full force. Unfortunately, we can be wrong, and we are sometimes wrong, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop watching the game out of (mock) disbelief.

We also cannot blame our apparent apathy on the fact that the entire Verizon Center 400 level – and a sizable portion of the lower bowl – consisted of Syracuse fans. I don’t care how many orange shirts there were or how much noise they made. It is simply unacceptable that we were out-cheered at home. Obviously we can’t control the rest of the crowd, even when at home, but we can lead by our example. Our support (or lack thereof) drives the rest of the crowd, and can ultimately mean the difference in our team’s performance.

Furthermore, if you don’t like what you see on the court, you can boo. Yes, you can boo your own team. In the Northeast we do it all the time, and if you look at our track record, it gets results. Here at Georgetown, we boo the other team, we boo the refs when they make calls you disagree with – I’ve even seen students correct their professors in front of the class – and yet for some reason we are stupefied at the thought of speaking critically about a series of boneheaded turnovers, missed layups or poor defensive schemes. I don’t get it. Being yes-men (and women) – or only paying attention when things are going well – does no service to the team because that support is only superficial. Criticism, as long as it is warranted and constructive, can serve, not only to light a fire under people, but also to make your support much more meaningful.

It was sad to see our fan base give such a poor performance at such an important game. As great as the final minutes were, it was too little, too late. Dana O’Neil’s analysis of the game featured the headline “Hoyas’ heart not enough in the Big East” (Feb. 18, 2010, ESPN.com). I don’t think that’s entirely fair – our team played with plenty of heart. What she should have said was that nine minutes of heart shown by the fans at the end of the game is not enough to make up for the 31 minutes we spent letting our team down. Facing the prospect of our first losing streak this season and finding ourselves in the middle of the conference, we fans have only ourselves to blame.

Colin Nagle is a junior in the College. He can be reached at naglethehoya.com. Getting in Tune appears every other Monday at www.thehoya.com.

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