3,650

Three thousand six hundred and fifty. That’s the total draw that Clemson pulled at home for their NIT game on Monday. That’s 23,102 fewer fans than SU put in the seats for its win over San Diego State for our equivalent game. Way to go Clemson fans, you’re making your team proud. I guess that’s how they roll down in ACC country.

We get to see the Tigers’ cavernous empty arena for ourselves tomorrow night, thanks to some bizarre seeding from the NIT committee. South Carolina is a long haul from upstate New York, so most local Syracuse fans probably can’t pull a trip that far on a weeknight with two days notice. But wouldn’t it be sweet if ex-pat SU fans from surrounding southern states pulled together to get more than 3,650 just on our own? We could turn it into a defacto home game. Lord knows the orange-hued masses have done it before for us on the road, in places like NYC, DC, Philly, and FL. SC would normally be out of the question, but if the home team is only going to draw three grand, I think it’s possible. Clemson might pull a few more of their own people since they’re playing a big name opponent, but I’m not expecting much. They don’t know about the Love the way our people do.

This entry was written by Syracusan, posted on March 20, 2007 at 12:39 pm, filed under ACC, NIT. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

3 Comments

  1. Posted March 20, 2007 at 12:55 pm | Permalink

    Apparently its spring break this week as well, so we picked the perfect time to go there…

  2. Posted March 20, 2007 at 2:29 pm | Permalink

    Mike Waters has an interesting theory on the #2 seed.

    The NIT selection committee was in the process of setting up its brackets before the NCAA field was announced. The NIT thought Syracuse would be in the NCAA tournament.

    As a result, the NIT had West Virginia slotted as the No. 1 seed in the East and Arkansas (yep, Arkansas) as the No. 2 seed in the South.

    South Alabama would have played at Arkansas as part of the south region. Makes sense, no? And Arkansas at Clemson in the South region finals would make sense, too.

    Syracuse’s seeding has nothing to do with expected crowds or whether or not Syracuse was one of the top four teams in the NIT.

    In my opinion, Syracuse’s seeding had everything to do with an NIT committee having to reconfigure its brackets in a hurry after the NCAA field was announced.

    Seems believable.

  3. Posted March 20, 2007 at 2:36 pm | Permalink

    Yeah vote, thats actually how they do it. The brackets are set to a point that they seed with the teams that they think are on the outside, then fill in the empty slots with the teams that got snubbed (SU/KState as 2 seeds).

    Also, I wonder what the boys will do when theres not 25k+ screaming at them and supporting them tomorrow. Lets hope they can stay up. Maybe Mike Jones will come root on the Orange, hes probably chilling at home in SC right now…

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