There were more than 4,500 Wake Forest students at Saturday night’s game — out of an undergraduate enrollment of 5,441 — and a good number of them ended up celebrating on the turf after the win over N.C. State all but sealed the Atlantic Division for the Demon Deacons.
As field stormings go, it may not have been as impressive as some others visually — one press-box joker called it a field-drizzling — but it would be hard to beat in terms of percentages. It was close to midnight when the public-address announcer finally started pleading with them to leave the field. Some of them, anyway: “Wake Forest football players please return to the locker room at this time. Thank you.”
It was far from the first field-storming of the football season, and not even the first involving Wake Forest. North Carolina fans did it a week earlier after beating the previously unbeaten Deacons at Kenan Stadium, Appalachian State fans did it after an upset of Coastal Carolina and N.C. State fans did it a month earlier after the Wolfpack’s win over Clemson at Carter-Finley Stadium.
All of it served as a reminder that the pandemic may not quite be over, but many of the rites and traditions of college sports are back nonetheless. That was certainly noticeable during football season, but it has been like a splash of cold water in the face now that basketball season is under way.
Whether it was the sensation of basketball season opening with two big games in a packed Madison Square Garden full of NBA stars and celebrities, or the sight of North Carolina’s two newest alumni season-ticket holders — Roy and Wanda Williams — taking their seats at the Smith Center or the sound of Cameron Crazies crammed back into the bleachers across from the Duke bench, it’s a far (and loud) cry from the empty, sterile buildings that hosted the limp, quiet games that belatedly started the previous season.
By the Final Four there was at least a modicum of fans back in arenas, but nothing you’d call an actual crowd, the kind that can wrap itself around a game and lift it somewhere it wouldn’t go otherwise. The difference in the environment now is palpable and obvious and crucial. And with last season’s freshmen denied the essential experience of college basketball, two full classes of players are feeling that force for the first time.
At Duke on Tuesday, the (mostly masked) students were up to all their old tricks, dancing to all the same old songs, chanting all the same old chants. It was hard to say, soaking it all in, whether the experience felt more intense because of its absence a year ago, or it drove home just how strange things were without them. Maybe both.
“I think a little bit of both,” said Duke senior Joey Baker, who was around pre-pandemic and mid-pandemic and is still around semi-post-pandemic. “You ran out of the tunnel and there wasn’t much going on. Now we have the Cameron Crazies back and they fuel our runs and help us on defense and opposing teams, they feel them. They help us out a ton, obviously.”
The early reviews are more mixed on the court. Duke followed its opening win over Kentucky with a pair of uneven performances against Army and Campbell — wins nonetheless. North Carolina is unbeaten, but needed everything it had to get past Brown, picked to finish fifth in the Ivy League, to get to 2-0. And poor N.C. State is also 2-0, but lost the ACC’s best defensive player less than a minute into the season — if only Manny Bates’ shoulders were as tough as his play in the post — and barely squeaked past Colgate.
Colgate, at least, has a strong chance to return to the NCAA tournament again this spring. At the moment, it’s the ACC’s second-best win, after Duke over Kentucky.
Things haven’t gone great so far: Virginia lost to Navy, Louisville lost to Furman, Georgia Tech lost to Miami (Ohio), Miami lost to Central Florida, Pittsburgh may lose to everyone — including, but hardly limited to, Colgate.
So a combined 7-0 — 9-0 if you go statewide and include Wake Forest — regardless of how they got there is still a heck of a lot better than the rest of the ACC at large.
At the moment, Duke is the only ACC team in the top 20 of Ken Pomeroy’s efficiency ratings. The ACC has finished the season with fewer than three of the top 20 only once since expanding to 15 teams, and that was last season, not exactly a banner year for the conference. There are two ACC teams in this week’s Associated Press top 25 poll: Duke and UNC. The SEC has eight. The Big Ten has five. There’s a lot of work ahead.
Hey, the ACC is a football league anyway, right? Just ask Wake Forest, where one challenge will be getting some of those 4,584 students — the most to ever attend a home football game, according to the school — off the field and into Joel Coliseum during basketball season. At least this time around, they’re welcome.
