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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Commentary
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2001
Doug
Pacey
Columnist
sportskansan.com
Raise spirits wear blue to games
Hey, Matt Dwyer, it's great that you and other student senators are trying to get students better seats at Allen Fieldhouse, but the seats aren't the problem.
The students are.
Either they don't know what Kansas' colors are or they're too cool to wear blue.
Only when students stop wearing their Abercrombie yellows, Gap grays, Adidas oranges and thrift-store plaids at basketball games should the Athletics Department even consider giving them seats that surround the court.
Kansas students like to think that they're better than their counterparts at Kansas State and Missouri. Well, maybe we are, but at least the kids at those schools know how to dress for basketball and football games.
Watch a Mizzou basketball game, and you'll see that the students with the best seats at the Hearnes Center wear yellow or black shirts. At K-State football games, the entire student section — and stadium — is mostly purple. And while we're on the topic of football, it'd be nice if you could get the students to wear blue at Memorial Stadium, but you'd have to work on actually getting them there first.
Kansas is the only school in the Big 12 Conference that has blue as one of its colors. It just makes sense to wear blue. Everyone doesn't have to wear the same shirt or go buy a new one. Any blue shirt will do and just about an shade, except baby blue, is fine
Imagine floor-to-ceiling, blue shirts at the north and south ends of the fieldhouse. Talk about a home-court advantage. That's good for at least a few baskets and would surely impress the hotshot basketball recruits at games.
Matt, you're an off-campus Delta Force senator. You know how politics work. It's pretty hard to sell something that's a lie. Part of your argument for giving students better seats is that it would make televised games at the fieldhouse look livelier. When the camera pans across the court to follow the ball, it will show millions of home viewers a raucous group of students instead of gray-haired alumni twiddling their thumbs.
That would be great if that were the case. The truth is, less than 20 percent of the 7,700 students at men's basketball games are the kind of fans that can compare to Duke's Cameron Crazies.
They are the students who camp out for days, and sometimes weeks, before home games. They are "The Phog Fanatics," "Neil's Atomic Fireballs," "Roy's Boys" and nearly a dozen other Jayhawk-basketball-crazed student groups.
If any students deserve to sit court side, it's them. They aren't colorblind. They make signs. They are loyal fans. The coaches know them and so do the players.
The other 6,000 students show up the day of the game and are decent fans, but other than the ones wearing bright yellow colors, they don't stand out.
That's fine. There's nothing wrong with not camping out or missing some home games. Some people like basketball more than others. People have different priorities.
And yours, Matt, should be to get all 7,700 students to wear blue at home games.
Pacey is an Issaquah, Wash., senior in journalism
BALL STATE 93 - KANSAS 91, 1ST ROUND OF INVITATIONAL
Atropical punch in Maui
Ball State upsets Kansas in first-round action of men's tourney
By Ryan Malashock Kansan sportswriter
The third second-half cramp proved to be the most costly for No.4 Kansas yesterday.
terday. The Jayhawks fought off Ball State the entire second half while junior forwards Drew Gooden and Nick Collison battled leg cramps, but Kansas couldn't withstand freshman Aaron Miles' ill-timed, last-second cramp.
Ball State's Patrick Jackson drove past Miles, who tripped and fell after suffering cramps in both legs. Jackson scored a layup between two Kansas defenders
with eight-tenths of a second left. Jackson's drive clinched Ball State's 93-91 upset victory against Kansas in the opening round of the Maui Invitational.
Gooden played most of the second half but was bothered by his leg cramps. Collison, though, left the game with 17 minutes left in the second half. He played only two minutes the rest of the way.
tiring like the stamp in the door "Nick's were the worst, Drew's were bad, and then there was Aaron at the end of the game. We haven't played at this temperature, and it was an up-and-down tempo game."
Williams said he had never seen anything like the cramp attacks.
A desperate, full-court heave from Gooden, intended for freshman guard Keith Langford, was knocked away by three Ball State defenders as time expired.
After watching Ball State (1-0) sprint out to a 55-48 halftime lead, Kansas built a six-point lead with two minutes remaining. But Cardinal guard Chris Williams, who finished with 24 points, scored his only points of the second half on a three-pointer to tie the game with 45 seconds to go.
Miles had a wide-open look from the right baseline with 15 seconds left, but the ball slipped out of his hands, and he was called for traveling. The traveling call set the stage for Jackson's dramatic score. Miles was apologetic after the game.
"For me, I turned it over, and in the end my man scored," Miles said. "So it's my fault. That's how I feel about it."
With Gooden and Collison battling cramps and freshman Wayne Simien out because of a knee injury, senior Jeff Carey, normally a role player, played 20 minutes,
and sophomore Bryant Nash fouled out in only eight minutes of action.
However, Gooden managed to post a career-high 31 points and 10 rebounds while Collison scored 15 points. Junior guard Kirk Hinrich added 14 points and six assists. Ball State made two fewer field goals than Kansas yesterday, but the Cardinals burned the Jayhawks from the outside, making 13 of 30 from three-point range.
Once hoping for a shot at a title-game match-up with Duke, Kansas now must settle for a loser's bracket game at 3 p.m. today against the loser of last night's Houston/UCLA game.
for box score see page 5A
Big 12 hurts Kansas' athletics budget
Contact Malashock at 864-4858
By Aaron Johnson Kansan sportswriter
The Kansas football team is wrapping up a season in which it endured punishing losses in packed stadiums at Colorado, Kansas State and Texas. Meanwhile, the Athletics Department budget continues to suffer because of a 1995 revenue-sharing agreement
Before the agreement, when Kansas belonged to the Big 8 Conference, schools in the conference poured all ticket money from conference games into a pool that was divided equally by all eight schools. That meant that when Kansas played before big crowds in road games, the department received a share of the ticket revenue from those games.
The formation of the Big 12 Conference in 1995 brought four Texas schools together with the former Big 8 schools and marked a major change in the way those schools shared football ticket and television money.
Agreement benefits successful teams
Under the Big 12's agreement, schools keep the ticket money collected at their stadiums instead of sharing it with visiting opponents. The arrangement rewards schools with football teams that have high home-game attendance and large television audiences nearby, while schools including Kansas have had to cut programs to stay afloat.
Bob Frederick, former Kansas athletics director, said the Big 12's revenue-distribution formula had been a
major factor in creating budget constraints that left him with the task of eliminating two athletic programs last spring. In March, Frederick announced that the department would cut the Kansas men's swimming and tennis teams. He stepped down as athletics director in July and is now a professor in the School of Education.
"I think that if we had equal television revenue distribution like the Big 10, then we definitely would not have been in the situation last spring to drop the two athletic programs," said Frederick, who was a member of the committee that wrote the new settlement. "Teams were supposed to be rewarded if you were good or played strong teams, but it doesn't work out that way."
How conferences share TV revenue
"The Big 12 settlement has benefited the Texas schools as well as Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma," Frederick said. "The increase in base appearance and participation fees has been distributed as a function of the television sets in a school's area, which has hurt schools such as Kansas, Kansas State and Iowa State."
Big 8 (ended in 1995)
Since the Big 12 was formed, Iowa State has also cut its men's swimming program because of budget constraints.
How the Big 12 divides up TV money
In the absence of ticket-revenue sharing, the distribution of television money has become more important to struggling athletics departments.
The Big 12 awards half of the
SEE AGREEMENT PAGE 5A
Jayhawk women search for right hoops combo
By Jessica Scott Kansan sportswriter
With a cluster of games quickly approaching, Kansas women's basketball coach Marian Washington is continuing to experiment with the combination of players, her starting lineup. The team's starters in tonight's game at Creighton (0-1) are still a mystery.
Senior guards K.C. Hilgenkamp and Selena Scott are the only staples in Kansas' starting five with a host of Jayhawks competing for the remaining three positions. Senior centers Nikki White and Kristin Geoffroy will share time this season as both continue to improve. Sophomores Keila Beachem and Sharonne Spencer will compete against freshman Blair Waltz to fill the Jayhawks' power forward slot.
Washington said the four position had always been an area of question and was still up in the air.
"We have been working Sharonne and Keila there but have started working Blair there, too," she said.
Waltz said she was up for competing for her spot during the season.
"I know that if I play the four spot, I have to play a different role on the team than if I play the guard spot, but I'm willing to do whatever it takes to help the team win," Waltz said.
Kansas (1-0) leads the all-time series with Creighton, 14-9 , but the Jayhawks have not defeated the Blue Jays since 1998, losing 76-54 last season. Washington said she expected to see a lot of shots behind the arc and hoped her team can stop Creighton defensively.
defensively.
"Our coverage on the wings will have to be wide and keep a hand up because they will definitely put up the threes," Washington said. "They've lost a lot of players, and so both of our teams will be relatively young. It will be really interesting to see how we fare, but I'm very optimistic."
Contact Scott at 864-4858
Little significance placed on final football game
By Brent Briggeman Kansan sportswriter
Senior safety Brandon Wier remembers the low point of his football career at Kansas.
Wier was a redshirt freshman in 1998 when the Jayhawks, 6-3 at the time, played host to North Texas in
a nonconference game in November that held no bowl implications.
"Put 10,000 people in the stands, spread them out, drop the temperature to about 20 degrees and somehow make it rain at the same time, and you have the setting for that game." Wier said of the Jayhawks' 23-14 win before an announced crowd of 20,000. "Everything was cold and wet, and the whole stadium seemed to gather underneath the press box. There wasn't much of an atmosphere."
The North Texas game was the first
The game was initially slated to be played on Fox Sports television on Sept. 15. It was rescheduled when all college games were postponed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. At the time, both teams were 1-1 and still playing with the optimistic hopes of a successful season.
time the Jayhawks had played a nonconference game past the first week of October since 1962. The second time will be this Saturday, when a struggling Wyoming team (2-8 overall, 0-7 in the Mountain West Conference) will come to Lawrence and face the struggling Jayhawks (2-8 overall, 1-7 in the Big 12 Conference).
Now, with the Cowboys in the midst of an eight-game losing streak and the Jayhawks riding a six-game skid of their own, the game has little significance. Like the game against North Texas, the lack of importance will likely be reflected by a small crowd.
Several students, including Kent Doege, Monroe, Wis., junior, said they wouldn't spend the money or the time to watch Saturday's game.
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SEE ATTENDANCE PAGE 5A