Post by FLHoya on Nov 23, 2006 2:29:13 GMT -5
rbhoya said:
In short, I think Rob would have had a totally different view on that if he had sat where I did for the game. It's tough to say our fans showed a lack of class when you're comparing them to some of the ODU folk.
You know where I sat during the game. In the end, neither team's fans came out of this looking very good. The conduct of a bunch of idiotic ODU fans was a partial cause of some of the negative fan behavior. But a good deal of it had nothing to do with the ODU section. The main incident I chose to focus on in my recap was the number of students who stormed the scorer's table after the charging call against Jon Wallace. I actually don't tend to care that much about "chants"--I participated in both of the ones in question here. But the whole running out of the stands thing after the bad call...that's just one I personally would never do and did strike me as over the line in a major way.
I brought this up off the board with CAHoya when I submitted my recap to him, but I was on the fence as to whether to write as I did about fan beahvior--reason being I wondered whether this was an isolated incident or a trend. I figured--when are we ever going to see the same combination of factors (large # of students in small setting, proximity to opposing fans, antagonistic opposing fans, rather humiliating loss) again?
We probably won't see all of those factors together at once again any time soon. But at the same time, Georgetown WILL lose a "bad" game at home eventually (the WVU game last year stands out to me as a recent example), opposing fan bases will be antagonistic (see WVU again, I've always hated ND fans no matter how bad their team is), and other fans will be close to GU fans and students at some point or another. So the lessons are probably worth learning rather than sweeping under the rug.
Whatever your opinion on the issue of whether certain cheers are "profane", whether you should leave early from a game, or what to do with antagonistic opposing fans...I can't see under any stretch of the imagination how GU's student fans came out of Sunday's game looking good. Which is too bad, but I personally think it will turn out to be an isolated freak incident that we'll forget about in a few months...
...only to return to it briefly, in March, when the angry students from Sunday night are proven right, and ODU is setting up their first round NIT date while we're flying somewhere for the NCAA Tournament.