Into the Dean Dome

By Harold

A Monday night, rain, an anonymous opponent, a 22,000-person stadium, and a home team coming off a 20-point loss — it all added up to plenty of seats available for last night’s UNC men’s basketball game against Gardner-Webb  ($20 for the lower level, anyone?), and I took advantage.

The first things you notice (after your eyes adjust to the wall of baby blue) are the hundreds of banners in the rafters. There’s a banner for an NIT appearance (yes, appearance) earlier this decade, which I guess honors UNC for being one of the 96 best teams in the country (at the time there were 64 spots in the NCAA tournament and 32 in the NIT). Go Tar Heels!

Oh yes, there’s also a huge banner celebrating the 1924 “national championship,” which apparently was awarded years later by the Helms Foundation. Fortunately, even the on-campus newspaper refuses to recognize this fake title — the first paragraph of the lead editorial in today’s DTH mentions the Tar Heels’ “five national championships,” which were in 1957, 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009.

But beyond that is the reason why Cameron Indoor Stadium has the best atmosphere of any basketball gym. I’m not naive enough to think that Duke has the best fans, because let’s face it, they don’t support the other athletic teams and even basketball attendance is declining. And I don’t think it’s an unfair assumption to say that some state schools have rowdier (or drunk, carefree, unburdened by studies) students.

The reason is Cameron’s layout. The lower level is entirely students, 360 degrees around, and students are going to be more passionate than rich alumni who can afford courtside tickets. I give Duke credit for not taking the easy money and selling seats in the lower bowl, or even building a bigger arena to sell more tickets like their neighbors, UNC and N.C. State.

At UNC, the students take up one half of the baseline closest to the UNC bench, and then a random corner near the opponent’s bench between the baseline and the sideline. Overall, that’s about 15 percent of the lower bowl. And no matter how crazy the paying public is, they’re not as loud or connected as students, so the atmosphere is never the same.

Other than that, the student experience at Duke and UNC seems similar. I didn’t hear any improvised chants last night, but they jumped up and down before tipoff, had a similar number of standard cheers, had some unique hand motions (like pulling back an arrow and then flinging their arms out), and ended their fight song by yelling “Go to Hell, Duke!”

It’s hard to use a blowout of Gardner-Webb to draw too many conclusions (same with my previous Dean Dome experience, as a reporter at a Duke-UNC game, although for the opposite reason). But I will say that if you’re interested in seeing a game up close, it’s 1,000 times easier and cheaper at UNC, starting with the next home game, the Sunday after Thanksgiving against Nevada.