David Carter insists that playing a basketball game against the Utah State Aggies at the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum in Logan, Utah is, well, enjoyable.
Don’t believe him.
“It’s fun to play in, really,” the Nevada Wolf Pack coach said this week. “Going in there you know the energy is going to be there in the building. You don’t have to get your team up to play there.”
Spoken like a coach who has to find a way to win a game there every year. For opposing teams, though, fun is the last word they’d use to describe an evening at the Aggies’ 10,270-seat torture palace.
Utah State has won 90 of its last 93 games at home. It has had winning streaks of 37 and 33 games at home in recent years. Aggies coach Stew Morrill is 200-14 at home since taking over the program in 1998-99. The Aggies are 45-3 in Western Athletic Conference games at home since joining the conference in 2005-06. And it isn’t because the Aggies have always had the best talent in the league. But there is little doubt, though, that they typically have the best fans.
“It’s the toughest place to play in the country,” Saint Louis coach Rick Majerus told ESPN.com recently. “And I‘ve been to Duke and all around the country.”
Majerus had to deal with the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum fans from 1989-2004 on a yearly basis as Utah’s head coach.
“It’s not mean spirited,” Majerus added. “It’s not like you are going to get hit with a hot dog or anything. I’ve been to Oakland Raider games. Utah State has an Oakland Raider mentality without the knives and guns.”
Majerus says the Aggies’ home court advantage begins even before the opposing team steps onto the court.
“The arena is tough to get to,” Majerus said. “You have to fly into Salt Lake City and then drive an hour or so in the winter on this treacherous drive that is like a highway to death.”
The drive to Logan, though, isn’t half as painful as trying to beat the Aggies at the Smith Spectrum. Just ask the Pack, who has to make its annual trip to Logan this Saturday (Jan. 7) night.
The Wolf Pack is 2-16 against the Aggies in Logan since first getting on that highway to death in January 1938. And, for the most part, it hasn’t been close. The Pack has lost those 16 games in Logan by an average of 14.3 points. Just two of the losses have been by less than 10 points. Four of the losses, including last year’s 67-45 defeat, have been by 21 or more points.
How’s that for fun?
The Pack has even lost two more regular season games to Utah State away from Reno that don’t count in that 2-16 record. Those two losses came in Ely on successive nights (Dec. 11 and 12) in 1953 by scores of 65-63 and 81-65 under coach Jake Lawlor.
The proceeds from those games went to a new football scoreboard at White Pine High. Utah State played the games with just seven players because they left their sophomores back home to play Montana State on Dec. 11 in Logan. The Aggies sophomores, of course, won and protected their home court by a score of 77-66.
The Aggies will likely have a full roster Saturday night and a full house in the stands. Utah State’s average home attendance this year leads the WAC at 9,944. Fresno State is a distant second in the WAC at 6,150. The Pack is fifth at 3,652.
“It is a real good, fun environment,” said Pack center Dario Hunt. “The fans are into the game. But they don’t get in your head. They are not out on the court with you. But they do have an advantage at home. Their fans fuel them at home.”
Forget the WAC. The Aggies’ fans just might be the best fans in the nation. They certainly are the most entertaining.
It all starts in the pre-game warm-ups when they all stands up and start chanting. “I believe that we will win. I believe that we will win.”
The Aggies’ “Big Blue” bull mascot, which got into a fight with New Mexico State mascot “Pistol Pete” during the 2009 WAC Tournament at Lawlor Events Center, then drops from the ceiling on a rope.
That’s just the beginning.
Utah State fans, led by the rotund Wild Bill Sproat, harass opposing free throw shooters throughout the game. Wild Bill who usually ends up shirtless by the end of the game, has been described as a “cholesterol soaked legend” and has dressed up as, among other things, a Pirate, a Chippendale dancer and a hula dancer.
And don’t believe Majerus, a guy that could pass for the pudgy Wild Bill Sproat if he took off his shirt, when he says it’s not mean spirited. The Aggies routinely hurl insults at opposing players, like the time a few years back when they berated a pudgy Western Michigan player with a chant of ‘jelly doughnuts, jelly doughnuts” as he stepped to the line.
“For me, it’s all about how involved and organized they are,” Wolf Pack junior Malik Story said this week. “They wear those little gloves (blue latex, of course) and they do all their chants. It’s pretty amazing how organized they are. Other fans say things and yell at you. But Utah State’s fans are organized.”
Story says he enjoys going to Logan.
“It’s the best place to play because if you win, you quiet them all down,” he said. “But the other way around is not too good.”
The other way around -- a Utah State victory -- is, by far, the norm in Logan.
The Aggies’ fans, once they sense a game is well within their Aggies’ reach, will start the one chant that opposing teams hate to hear.
All 10,000-plus fans, dressed in blue and white, will stand up and yell, “Winning team, losing team, winning team, losing team” over and over and point at the respective benches. Once that chant is unleashed, about the only thing left for the opposing team is to take a shower and get the heck out of Logan as fast as possible.
The Pack, though, has had two nights in Logan they wished would never end.
The first time was on March 6, 1993.
The game was a match up of two losing teams (the Pack was 8-17 and Utah State was 10-15 heading into the game) with lame duck coaches. Utah State had fired coach Kohn Smith in January and the Pack told Len Stevens he would not return in 1993-94 just five days before the trip to Logan.
All of the intangibles, though, seemed to be on the Pack’s side.
The Pack players and coaches were still seething and upset over Stevens’ firing just five days earlier and had something to prove. Utah State, on the other hand, was already in an apathetic malaise since Smith had been fired about six weeks earlier. The Aggies were also headed to the Big West Conference Tournament after the game. For the Pack, playing its last game, this was their tournament.
The Utah State fans, though, didn’t care about any of that. Here’s all you need to know about Utah State fans. A total of 8,372 fans showed up that night in March 1993 to see two losing teams with lame duck coaches.
The Pack, finishing its first year in the Big West, went out and beat the Aggies, 97-87, as Eric Morris scored 23 points and had 18 rebounds and Jody Daggs had a career-high 25.
“You can say we’re losers but losers don’t play for a lame duck coach the way our guys did for me,” Stevens said after the game.
Stevens walked down the Pack bench and hugged and kissed all his players during a timeout with 25 seconds still showing on the game clock.
“It was pretty close to a perfect night,” Stevens said.
The Pack’s second perfect night in Logan wouldn’t come for another 13 years.
The Pack, ranked No. 25 in the nation, brought an eight-game winning streak and a 21-5 record to Logan on February 25, 2006. The well-rested Pack was coming off a 74-68 win at Idaho five days earlier in front of a polite and almost invisible crowd of 1,017 at the Kibbie Dome.
The crowd in Logan, though, was another story.
The Dee Glen Smith Spectrum was busting at the seams as 10,270 blue and white and rowdy fans jammed into the building for the first Nevada-Utah State game in Logan when both were members of the WAC.
Pack coach Mark Fox had never been to Logan before the night of Feb. 25, 2006. Fox, though, thought his Pack was ready for the challenge.
“All week we practiced in the Virginia Street gym, which has the acoustics of an aluminum can,” Fox said during the week.
Like in the 1992-93 season, the Pack in 2005-06 headed to Logan having already lost to Utah State at Lawlor Events Center. The Pack scored just 19 points in the first half on Jan. 23 at Lawlor against the Aggies in a 59-53 loss. And now they had to go to an aluminum can stuffed with 10, 270 rowdy fans and try to win.
“It comes down to the basketball players, as it always does,” the always confident, business-like, make-no-excuses, focused Fox said before the game.
Those 10,270 fans saw a Pack party and nobody was chanting “winning team, losing team” in the final minutes as the Pack won easily, 75-57.
Marcellus Kemp scored 26 points and Nick Fazekas scored 23 points with 16 rebounds.
“Our kids had an unbelievable focus,” Fox said after the game.
It was the Pack’s ninth win in a row, a streak that would reach 14. It also clinched a WAC regular season championship for the Pack, And, oh yeah, it was Utah State’s biggest margin of defeat at home since a 19-point loss to Utah in 1997.
But all of the Pack success did little to temper the spirit of the Aggies’ fans.
With their heroes down by 18 with 25 seconds to play, they started chanting, “Aggies, Aggies, Aggies.”
Kemp then calmly drained a 3-pointer and they all sat down.
“Their fans can get on you pretty bad,” Kemp said after the game. “But that’s motivation for me. I heard them saying, ‘Aggies, Aggies, Aggies.’ But they calmed down when I made it. It took the wind out of them.”
That was the last time the Pack left Logan with a smile on their faces. The last five times they’ve had to make a trip down that highway to death after a game in Logan, have all been after losses.
The first time was on Jan. 6, 1938 when coach Doc Martie’s Wolf Pack lost 65-39. All in all it was a miserable experience for the Pack, which had to endure a bumpy train ride the night before after beating Wyoming in Cheyenne, 35-32.
The Pack’s first trip to Logan was, well, a sign of things to come over the next 75 years.
“The visitors (the “Wolves,” as they were commonly called in 1937-38) complained vigorously about the rather small Logan floor,” reported the Nevada State Journal.
There have been other, more frustrating evenings for the Pack in Logan.
Wayne Estes, arguably Utah State’s greatest player ever, scored 40 points in a 101-80 victory over the Pack and coach Jack Spencer on Dec. 14, 1965 in front of 5,011 fans. It was only the fifth time in the Pack’s history that they allowed 100 or more points.
Coach Jim Padgett’s Pack, which had beaten Stanford and Cal to open the season, lost at Logan. 89-75 on Dec. 11, 1973 as 5,045 fans looked on.
The most frustrating Pack loss in Logan of all, though, came on March 2, 2007. The Pack, ranked 10th in the nation, lost in overtime, 79-77, for just their third loss in 29 games. Utah State’s Jaycee Carroll tied the game with a lay-up at 77-77 and Chaz Spicer’s two free throws won it with 3.8 seconds to go in overtime.
The Pack had led 40-25 after a 3-pointer by Fazekas in the first half.
It was a night of great emotion.
Fox charged the court after Fazekas was called for an offensive foul with 3:56 to go in regulation (Utah State was up 66-62) and bumped an official.
“I deserved the technical,” Fox said after the game.
The Utah State fans, which had been waving towels and taunting the Pack players all game long, rushed the court after the game.
But, as Majerus said, there were no reports of knives and guns.
It was just another Utah State victory over the Pack in Logan.
