“There he is,” said Matt Samel, a senior criminal justice major. “The ugly man, right there.”
Samel was pointing at Iowa’s star forward Jarrod Uthoff, who had just emerged from the locker during halftime of the Terrapins men’s basketball team’s Thursday night bout against the No. 3 Hawkeyes.
Each time Uthoff stepped to the charity stripe during the game, the Xfinity Center crowd showered him with chants of “You are ugly!” It was relentless. It was mean. But it also seemed to work.
Uthoff has feasted on opposing defenses all season, entering Thursday’s game averaging a Big Ten best 18.9 points per game. Yet by the end of the Terps’ 74-68 win, the national player of the year candidate had scored just nine points.
Seeking to find the source of the “You are ugly!” chants, I ventured into the student section during halftime. I asked a fan sitting in an aisle seat if he wanted to talk about Uthoff, and he politely agreed.
But once word of our conversation trickled to his friends, Samel, sporting a backwards blue snapback, jumped out of his seat.
“I said to [Uthoff] before the game that I’m going to live in his head; I’m going to post a hammock in his head, establish residency there, start a family,” Samel said. “I’ve definitely done that so far.”
Samel didn’t take credit for starting the “you are ugly” chants, but “we had been telling him that before the game,” he said.
By the start of the contest, virtually all of the announced 17,950 had joined in on the festivities, delighting in each Iowa misstep and Terps basket. It goes without saying that home court advantage is tremendously helpful in college basketball. But after the Terps’ 25th straight win in College Park, the case can be made that Xfinity Center presents perhaps the best environment in the country.
“On a national scale, pretty impressive,” Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said of the crowd.
While the Terps’ home winning streak continued to grow Thursday, the nation’s longest-active Division I run was snapped — No. 18 Arizona’s 83-75 loss to No. 23 Oregon was their first defeat at McKale Center in 50 games.
Sure, the Terps are far from that mark. But there’s no denying the superb turnouts at Xfinity this season. The Terps’ average home attendance of 17,827 tops the Big Ten, the conference that’s led the nation in men’s basketball attendance for 39 consecutive years.
Of the Terps’ 12 home games this year, all but two have been sellouts, including four of the five contests during winter break, when most students weren’t on the campus.
At around 6 p.m. Thursday, Samel and his buddies trickled into their seats a few rows back from the court. Most of the arena was empty — except for Uthoff and his Hawkeyes teammates, who were stretching on the court. That’s when the heckling started.
“He looked over and the players laughed at me,” Samel said. “They were probably like blowing us off like we had nothing [to] do with it.”
It’s tough to quantify exactly how much of an impact the home crowd had on last night’s victory. I can throw as many stats at you as I want, but it’s not like any of the Iowa players came out last night and attributed the loss directly to the noise.
Uthoff offered a bland statement: “Good environment.”
But I do know that my ears were ringing throughout the game. I do know that scores of fans lined up several hours before the game in hopes of snagging desirable seats. The mountains of snow decorating campus hardly proved an impediment for the students.
Not with a chance to knock off Iowa and Uthoff.
By the time the sellout crowd had arrived Thursday, those attending had heard what Uthoff said about Xfinity Center earlier in the week: his comment about the venue not presenting any new challenges.
“Well, that’s a lie,” Samel said. “This is the best home court in the country.”
It’s doubtful Samel has the time or resources to test the validity of that statement and sample every single college basketball arena in the nation.
But if you were in the arena tucked along the outskirts of the campus Thursday night, you’d have a hard time disagreeing with him.
