The trouble was the fusion. How to devise a lie that simultaneously felt funny and clever and ultimately harmless. Which combination of words, about Duke freshman Cooper Flagg, to slap on a poster?
“I was trying to think of what lie about him would be funny,” fourth-year College student Campbell Ziselman says, explaining the difficulty.
“Cooper Flagg wets his bed” was one option, and “Cooper Flagg wears a diaper” was another. “Cooper Flagg sleeps with a night light” was a slightly less crass alternative. Ziselman, an officer in the student fan group Hoo Crew, knew he had to be ready.
The traveling circus, after all, is coming to town, wearing blue and white and tooting horns, towing all the pageantry of an eyeball-arresting season. No. 3 Duke will alight in John Paul Jones Arena at 8 p.m. Monday, and that means everyone will be there.
Maybe because of Flagg, the 6-foot-9, 205-pound generational talent. Maybe because of the Blue Devils’ (22-3, 14-1 ACC) ranking. Maybe simply because of the name of the school. Maybe it is none of those things. Maybe it is all of them.
No matter what, it will be loud, and it will be hype.
“It’s gonna be just loud and to the point where it doesn’t even feel like a real experience, because it’s just 14,000 people making noise,” Ziselman says.
The Duke game carries unique potential in a season like this, Virginia’s worst in the last decade and a half. Attendance has lagged. Apathy — at least temporary doses of it — has squeezed some of the fanbase. A game like this, with potential for a tremendous upset, could place the program back in the spotlight it had grown accustomed to.
Duke enters coming off a 106-70 beatdown Saturday of Stanford. Before that, it was a 78-57 drubbing of California. A loss at Clemson last weekend is the team’s only defeat in conference play. That aside, Duke has won every game by double-digits since late January. All added up, the Blue Devils are beating opponents in conference games by an average of more than 20 points.
For its part, Virginia is playing its best basketball of the season now, with a plucky victory Saturday at Virginia Tech delivering a third straight win for the first time since November and vaulting the Cavaliers toward the conference’s middle. Individual players seem to be turning corners. Something is clicking. But it will take something else against this goliath. It will take the crowd.
That includes the band. One estimate puts the number at 125 band members expected for this game, standing behind the basket in their orange shirts.
“It’s hard [for the energy] to be sustained for 40 minutes,” Koch says. “That’s really hard for a crowd to do. A crowd [alone] just doesn’t do it.”
Some schools’ bands script everything out, synchronized with cheerleaders and mascots and promotions people. At Virginia, says Associate Director Dr. Andrew Koch, they adjust, in the way they play their music, to what is going on in the game.
Koch treats every game the same, he insists. Games are not “big” or “not big.” Games are games, and the band’s duty is to help deliver the atmosphere.
That may be the mindset, and an admirable one. But one of his band members, in particular, might think differently.
Disguised in the band is a minor X celebrity, one who asked to remain unnamed in order to protect the anonymous nature of his account. He tweets to 411 followers as Andrew Rohde Fan. This all began this past summer, when he changed his account’s profile picture to Rohde, and then, X refused to let him change the picture back, decided to embrace the bit. He has a picture of Raising Cane’s chicken as his banner image, because he once glimpsed Rohde in the establishment.
The account has taken off this year, in part because of content about the program’s struggles. Its biggest post is a screenshot of the metric system kenpom.com showing just how poor Virginia and Virginia Tech are, ranked side-by-side outside the nation’s top 100.
“It’s indicative of how poorly we’re doing right now,” he said. “But it’s an off year.”
That does not mean fans can also take a year off, he says. This is a huge game, and people have to show up.
“We’ll be more passionate,” he said, including his fellow band members. “We’ll be loud. I know the band. We’re loud. We’re obnoxious. We do a lot of heckling.”
These are the games where the arena becomes its own character, tugged to life, almost a person on the court. Ziselman and Koch both mentioned the “sixth man” in interviews.
Many students will arrive early, probably four or five hours before tipoff, angling for the best seats. Midcourt, Ziselman says, is the best view. It is cool to sit behind the home bench and see the coaches interact. But if you want to make an impact?
The visiting bench it is.
Duke Coach Jon Scheyer’s team knows it is coming. It is certainly nothing new. They have talked all season, Scheyer said on last week’s ACC media call, about embracing it. They welcome the hate and the hype.
In theory, that is. It is tough to welcome something when it means your face and a witty — or not — jest plastered across a posterboard.
In the end, Hoo Crew settled on the “Cooper Flagg sleeps with a night light” concept for their Flagg sign. It is not exactly their finest work. Last season’s sign superimposing the faces of North Carolina’s Armando Bacot, RJ Davis and Coach Hubert Davis on babies, with the words “Hoos Your Daddy?” drew a laugh from Bacot’s mother.
A sign from two years ago saying “Duke players think the earth is flat,” with a picture of Kyrie Irving, also probably reached a higher standard of cleverness. So did the planned sign this year for Duke freshman Khaman Maluach, who threw up during a game earlier this season.
You can probably guess where that led. A picture of Maluach hurling, below “Puke” in big letters, a play on the rhyme with Duke. They even made sure to get the font right.
None of it is particularly elegant. That is not what it’s about. It is about the noise and the atmosphere.
“There’s another level that JPJ can be,” Ziselman said “And it will be for as long as the game is competitive.”
That may be a half. That may be the whole time. That may be five minutes. Whatever it is, the fans are ready.
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