If you want some ECU, then hopefully you didn’t miss our pre-game/in-game entry or our first postgame entry. We’ll have a little more State-ECU talk during the week since we were busy with work last week and didn’t have a lot leading up to the game.
Today’s entry is focused on something much more broad in the NC State community. SFN is always looking for ways to offer improvement to NC State, and we sincerely can’t think of an easier topic to try to hammer home to Wolfpackers than the desperate need to change the way we cheer at NC State’s games. We’re serious. Hopefully, with your help, we can be a successful ‘change agent’ of a major flaw rooted deep within the NC State football/basketball environment.
The following video was taken from the field of Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium after NC State’s ‘legislated’ ass-whooping on Saturday. When you watch it, pay special attention to the beginning when you can clearly hear the “Nnnnnn Ccccccc State…NC State” cheer resonate from the stands. Note how weak the cheer is. Note how sloppy it is. Note how short it lasts because of the fans frustration with their inability to execute it (for probably the one-thousandth time in their lives).
Did you hear how horrible it was?
As we have highlighted before – why on God’s green earth do our fans – conditioned for years by the cheerleaders – INSIST on such an IMPOSSIBLE cheer to execute?
Have you ever been to an SEC or Big 12 football game? It really doesn’t matter which school. They all have a SERIES of cheers, chants and shouts that they execute in unison in response to cheerleaders, songs by the band and events that happen on the field (kickoffs etc). It is very impressive. Anyone who has ever been to such a venue will note that the common element that exists in each dictum is the brevity of the expression and the consistency of its delivery (while not trying to escalate or de-celerate pace).We turn your attention back to this old entry about Kansas State’s embarrassing pre-game video and want to re-emphasize and re-construct the following comments that we made at the time.
Note the use of the SIMPLE, two syllable chant/cheer that the crowd screamed with “K – Stateâ€. Note how they don’t try to *#^&# everything up with needless sophistication and turn something simple into something horrible like “Kkkkkkkkkkkk Staaaaaaatee. Go K-State!†or something like that.
Last year, App State came to Raleigh and loudly cheered “A-S-Uâ€. It resonated and made good noise because it is easy to say and all the fans can synchronize their chant. This year, “U-C-F†did the same thing. Again, it was pretty easy for them to build noise and momentum behind the simple cheer of three distinct sounds (I will call them syllables even though they technically are not)
Question: So, how do the cheerleaders and fans at three ’sound/syllable’ N-C-State choose to cheer for at least the last 20 friggin years?
Answer: Something that is impossible to synchronize or sustain for more than a couple of rounds with 60,000 fans, of course!! Think about how loud the ‘Wolf / Pack’ and ‘Red / White’ cheers are in Carter-Finley. They work great, don’t they? Gee. How does that work so well?
With that said, doesn’t it make complete sense that the naturally easy to cheer/chant, three syllable annunciation of “N-C-State†would be morphed into a garbled, unsustainable mess of a rapidly accelerating “Nnnnnnnnnnn Cccccccccccccc Staaaaaaate. NC State†that nobody can synchronize?
Said another way in this entry after a basketball game in February –
Even more frustrating is how we now have decades of fans that don’t seem to be able to realize that simply chanting the three syllables of N-C-State is significantly easier and more powerful than the ridiculous Nnnnnnnnn Cccccccccc Staaaaaate. NC State.
For example, as ABC televised the crowd rush the court after the win over Carolina the audible noise was the hum behind a garbled mess that was supposed to be Nnnnnnnnn Cccccccccc Staaaaaate. NC State. Nobody outside of the Wolfpack family had a clue what was being said. It’s absurd that cheerleaders and fans expect 20,000 fans at basketball games and 60,000 fans at football games to be able to hold the cadence, the timing, the rhythm and achieve unison of this ‘cheer’ when a simple, booming “N-C-State†would/could rock…AND be heard by others!
Ladies and gentlemen…let’s do something about this!!! Pass this entry around to friends on the internet and especially on campus. Get this feedback to the cheerleaders and ‘mic-man’ who leads student cheers at football games. The only way that we can finally get this right and add some muster to our game environment is to take control of this on your own.
The next time you are in the stands and this cheer quickly fizzles – its used more often in during basketball games than football – take a moment to ask everyone around you why they bother? LEAD others into the simple, “N-C-State” and try to keep it at an even/consistent pace instead of falling for the temptation to gradually speed it up so that it will get to a point where nobody can understand it even more quickly!
We’ll have more on this…but, after decades of not having any uniformed cheers to harness our voices, let’s make a change. Please feel free to share any other ‘improvement’ suggestions and thoughts that you have in our comments section. Thanks
