ACC Student Section Rankings

A recent Baltimore Sun blog post that ranked the basketball Student sections in the ACC made me think “I can do this a million times better!” So below, is my attempt to rank each team’s student section. Tune back each day (or every other day) as I count down to the best student section in the ACC We’ll do this Top 10 style, starting with the worst section first.

Starting with the worst today, coming in at # 12, the University of Virginia


#12 – UVA

I hate UVA for a lot of reasons and # 1 on my list of “reasons to hate UVA” is their student section. UVA likes to think they’re an ivy league school. They dress up in ties for games, they wear pastel colored shirts with popped collars, and they give off this aura of “douchbaggieness.” (Yes, I just made up that word and when you look in a dictionary of the future, they’ll have a picture of UVA students next to the word and definition).
Maryland fans in particular probably hate UVA fans the most for several reasons, but number one on my list came in 2002, when Maryland was playing at UVA. The star on that National Championship team, Juan Dixon, overcame a lot in his life but I’m sure one, if not the most difficult things was having to deal with both of his parents passing away from AIDS. So how does the UVA student section welcome Juan Dixon to Charlotte? By chanting “Crackhead parents!” Maybe one of the most classless things I’ve ever heard or seen in my life. The Terps still managed to win that game by the way. Here was Dixon’s stat line for the game, in which he overcame that horrible showing of humanity from UVA:

player start? Mp pt fgm fga fgpct ftm fta ftpct r a b s pf 3fgm 3fga 3fgpct Juan Dixon 36 16 5 13 38% 5 5 100% 3 4 0 0 2 1 3 33%

UVA’s student section has also been know to try to use “cheersheets” like the Cameron Crazies do, but their cheers are often lame, unoriginal garbage, much like their student body. Here is an excerpt from a UVA cheersheet that the DC Sports Bog on washingtonpost.com got a hold of last year:
“As we all know, Maryland fans are thugs. They probably don't even own a tie, never mind a blazer, and chants such as "You are all thugs," and "We don't riot," are perfect. Other parts of the cheersheet include making fun of Vasquez’s big nose and calling Mike Joes a nobody. Hardly a nobody.

The other thing wrong with UVA’s student section is something they can’t control, which is their arena. Their old venue got a lot more sound out of it and was a much harder place to play. Their new arena, in which they try to copy Maryland’s Comcast Center, except sans the ability of the place to be loud and intimidating like Comcast is, doesn’t have the same effect as their old court.

Here’s UVA’s student section score, which is what I’ll use to evaluate each school’s student section:

Attendance of students at all games (1-10) – 7
Creativity of student cheers (1-10) – 4
Intensity of students at games (1-10) – 8.5
Ability of arena to get loud (including proximity of students to court) – 8
Ability to united student section in cheers, movements, etc. – 9

Total score = 36.5/50