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LOGAN — Utah State president Stan Albrecht's controversial apology letter is old news to Aggie fans who attended the BYU game Nov. 11.
Even though the better part of a month has passed since then, the Spectrum student section decided to formally protest being apologized for with three minutes of silence during the game against Denver Wednesday.
If anyone wanted to find out what a quiet Spectrum sounded like, they got their wish. Partially due to the silence, the third-longest home winning streak in the nation was ended by a score of 67-54.
Senior point guard Brockeith Pane said the crowd’s vocal absence was definitely noticeable.
“Not having the crowds kind of hurt us,” he said. “We didn’t have our sixth man.”
Head coach Stew Morrill said he can’t control how the quiet atmosphere affects his players, but wasn’t focused on the crowd anyway.
“I was concentrating on how bad we were,” Morrill said. “It’s tough to have a showing like that.”
At the 17-minute mark, those who swiped their ID cards at the doors erupted into a chant of “Let’s go Aggies.”
That is, the students who were actually there cheered.
The student section, covering about 40 percent of the arena’s seats, was severely under-capacity. At tipoff, Section F was filled less than halfway. Sections H through L were only slightly better. Section G housed the band alone.
On a scale from 1-10 in terms of how loud the Spectrum can get, it was definitely less than a five.
The protest even seemed to extend to the court, as the Aggies quickly found themselves in a game they were losing.
Denver led by as much as 17 in the first half. Aside from senior forward Morgan Grim’s four foul shots, the Aggies were scoreless for a 10-minute stretch.
Without Jordan Stone’s six points and several defensive rebounds during that period, it would have been much uglier.
Things did not improve in the second half.
Denver erased early hopes of a comeback by building a 12- point lead in just over three minutes. The Aggies failed to score a field goal until sophomore forward Mitch Bruneel hit a layup with 15:10 on the clock.
Morale and discipline broke down as the inexperience showed when sophomore guard Preston Medlin had to burn a timeout when no one was in the backcourt to receive the inbounds pass.
“It’s a young team,” Pane said. “We’ve got to continue to get better.”
Tavin Stucki is a sophomore journalism student at Utah State University. He is the sports editor and football beat writer for the Utah Statesman, the Aggie campus newspaper. Twitter: @stuckiaggies
