Things You Need To Know: Day 1 in Columbus

So I arrived in Columbus a little bit before noon yesterday. I ran over to Cooper Stadium to pick up a Clippers hat, as they’re the Nats’ new AAA affiliate, expecting to head to Nationwide after and get a cheap Session 1 ticket from a desperate scalper shortly after tip. By the time the Clips’ staffers found a size 7-3/4 hat, UVa was up 19-4 and the game wasn’t even worth the $20 I was willing to pay. Thanks, Clips! You saved me $20 and an afternoon of tolerating deliriously happy Hoo fans. I appreciate it.

The evening session was something else entirely.

• Scalpers outside were getting absolutely destroyed, even though the arena was mostly full by game time. Lesson: unless you’re going to a North Carolina site featuring UNC, a Southern California site featuring UCLA, or somewhere similar where a highly crazed basketball fan base has a less than 3-hour drive to the arena, don’t buy in advance for the NCAA tournament unless you’re getting a great ticket for face value.
• Nationwide Arena is a beautiful hockey arena — shame the Blue Jackets are so bad. They took several design cues in the bowl from the Air Canada Centre; outside the bowl, the concourses are wide, with lots of food options, lots of hockey displays, and even a built-in practice rink. If I ever have a reason to be back here when the Jackets are in town, I’m definitely seeing a game.
• Ohio State fans made up a significant percentage of the crowd. Of the participating schools’ fans, Illinois dominated, and SIU came up behind. Holy Cross probably trailed us by a little bit, but their fans were great — lots of students, loud, excited, and had some class despite quite a bit of baiting from the SIU folks.
• We need to work on this whole basketball traveling thing, and we need to get out of our regional comfort zone. Columbus is no farther a drive for most Hokie fans than is Atlanta, but we don’t know much about the Midwest at all (we try to ignore West Virginia — states beyond it are completely lost), and I think that suppressed turnout somewhat.
• I had expected the Ohio State fans to lean Illinois’s way as a fellow Big 10 school, and I think they wanted to. But the way Illinois was playing, they just couldn’t; for most of the game, the OSU fans around me just rode both teams for the awful basketball they were witnessing. Tech played badly out of its usual Jekyll-and-Hyde incompetence (it was the N.C. State/Marshall/Western Michigan Hokies on display for 35 minutes); the Illini were deliberately making the game unwatchable, with sleep-inducing offensive sets and not a player on the court that wanted to shoot the ball. If Illinois had tried, they could have been up 18 at the half rather than 8; they left the door open all night long. The result: when Tech decided it wanted to win after all and pulled within one possession on the eventual game-winning run, the arena flipped over to our side.
• Second game quickie evaluation: neither team shot well (from the floor or the line). Holy Cross played hard, but SIU had probably the four best athletes on the floor, and that counts.
• Band rankings: SIU, Illinois, VT, Holy Cross. The Saluki band was a genuine highlight of the second game, playing everything from Hey Ya to Georgia On My Mind and a rather advanced mockery of Carry On My Wayward Son.

When it looked like the game was over midway through the second half, I was working on my Zen, and to some extent my conclusion holds even though we won: this basketball thing is only going to happen at Tech bit by bit. I’m nearly as proud of this Tech team as I was of the ‘04 football team, but it’s all baby steps, from the team (composure on the big stages) to the fans (get your leave requests in early, folks; worst case, you take two days off to watch wall-to-wall basketball on TV, and what’s so bad about that?) to the band (instrument distribution needed some rework for the sound to carry better from the floor).

But we’ll be here on Sunday, and that’s all that matters right now.

More Randomness!

The Fill BTN With Random Stuff ‘06 campaign continues this week, as we again wander North America through the text of a blog.

Up in the True North, Canadians elected a Conservative government for the first time since 1993 on Monday. Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper immediately provoked a minor spat with the USA by announcing plans to outfit three new naval icebreakers for Arctic duty; Canada claims sovereignty between the lines of longitude of its northernmost points of land all the way up to the North Pole, a claim generally ignored by everyone else on the planet; the Arctic was a submariners’ playground throughout the Cold War, and various countries have continued to sail below the icepack since. For my money, this is, as usual for Canada, a domestic political play thinly disguised as a foreign-policy dispute. Firing off a few small-caliber shots at America never hurt a Canadian pol, and Harper is in a tenuous position as the leader of a minority right-wing government that will have to work point-by-point coalitions with three opposing left-wing parties: the traditional rival Liberals who they forced out of power, the wacky near-socialist New Democrats, and the separatist Bloc Québécois. The Liberals in particular knocked Harper off in 2004 by trying to paint him as “George W. Bush-lite”, and cut into a once-big Tory lead this year the same way; being mildly irritating to us before he even gets into office is probably sound strategy. It’s vaguely disappointing, but Harper merits withholding judgement for now; if he can stay away from the spite that characterized Canadian Liberal governments’ transborder relations, he’ll be a major upgrade for both countries.

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Media Market Mythology: A Look Back

While surfing in the wake of Virginia Tech’s men’s basketball wins over Miami and Duke last week, I came across a late January article by Dave of Dave Sez, noting that Boston College’s 29 January game against Villanova was only BC’s second men’s basketball sellout of the year — despite being undefeated at the time — and only its second televised game as well.

Their second sellout of the season in an arena that holds just 8,606? In a city the size of Boston (over 5 million people)? That’s disgraceful.

The ACC suits fell in love with the idea of getting the Boston TV market, but they failed to recognize that no one there cares about BC.

Exactly right. This is why Virginia Tech fans used to go absolutely bonkers hearing about ACC expansion plans, based on media markets, that didn’t include the Hokies — whether they involved BC, Syracuse, or anybody else in the Northeast corridor. We’d been to those cities, played those teams, and knew full well how much people in the Northeast, outside of Connecticut and western Pennsylvania¹, cared about college sports anyway: not bloody much.

The Big East was built on televsion markets: New York, Boston, Philadelphia. The SEC is located in such media strongholds as Gainesville-Ocala, Knoxville, and Birmingham-Tuscaloosa. Yet somehow the SEC is the most profitable conference in the NCAA, while the Big East couldn’t defend itself against the raiding of its two top football schools and a founding member of the conference over the summer of 2003.

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Miracle

UPDATE 19-Feb-2005, 0105 EST: One of the pleasant surprises of 67-65’s aftermath was the way Duke handled the loss. From Coach K on down, through the players to the media (mainstream and Net) and the fans, their reaction was uniformly classy and respectful of this Hokie team. Jordan Kos, the beat writer for Duke’s student newspaper The Chronicle, compared Cassell to Cameron Indoor in fan support and atmosphere, which is high praise indeed.

The funny thing is, if they’d handled themselves similarly during and after their 100-65 win 3 Sundays ago, they probably wouldn’t have lost this one. Tech fans online were outraged over perceived bias in refereeing (perceptions backed up by fans of nearly every other ACC team, plus those of Syracuse, Pitt, UConn and Kentucky), but entirely within Duke’s control was the way the game ended. Krzyzewski could have called off the dogs at any point starting midway through the second half, with his team up by 25 and most of VT’s starters in deep foul trouble. Instead, he continued riding the refs, the Crazies chanted “PLEASE STOP FOULING” at a Hokie team that got called for breathing hard, and Duke’s starters stayed in until the final two minutes of the game. Close to the surface was Duke’s strong opposition, led by Krzyzewski, to the expansion that brought Tech into the conference; Hokies felt he was trying to rub his point in long after the refs had already driven it home.

With the notable exception of the quality folks at DBR, most of the treatment VT got from Duke before, during and after that match was disrespectful in the extreme. That made for motivation, both on the floor and in the Cassell stands. Duke planted the seeds of its own demise that Sunday night, and the Hokies nurtured them to fruitfulness on Thursday.

Live from the Comcast Center

I’m not a big fan of corporate-sponsored arena names, especially at the college level, but I suppose live-blogging from the second-deck concourse is one of the benefits of having the local cable giant sponsor the arena you’re visiting. :)

I managed to score VT-Maryland tickets Sunday morning (while still in Indiana) via Ebay, drove from Reston over into Maryland to pick them up Sunday afternoon, and now I’m here on the UMCP campus, 45 minutes from game time. Ah, the wonders of the ACC — being able to go see road games.

This is a super-nice arena, by the way. Plenty of room, very good sight lines, and they have the students right on top of the court (always a good idea in college basketball). In 5 years or so, when the demands of ACC basketball bring a Cassell replacement onto VT’s agenda, we could do a lot worse than this.

The game’s on Comcast SportsNet if you’re in the mid-Atlantic, so turn it on at 9 PM. Go Hokies!