It's good to be in Carolina blue

After watching No. 2 North Carolina beat Penn, 102-64, I'm jealous of the UNC fans. It's hard to knock the Palestra, but the 20,000-plus-seat Smith Center is an NBA stadium. It is the Wachovia Center painted Carolina Blue. I didn't get a chance to do too much travelling around the Dean Dome, but all I needed to see was the light blue ice cream to know how much the school cares about basketball. Every seat is a padded chairback, there are four enormous replay boards up top in each corner and of course viewers get to see an ACC team play every night.

The fans were different than Penn's, mainly because they showed up early. Many of the 19,378 in attendence seemed to arrive about 20 minutes before the 8 p.m. tipoff, but people started filing in two hours earlier, and by 7:30 p.m. it was more than half full. Did I mention that this was a non-conference game against a 6-5 team over break in early January? In addition the Band, mascot, dance team and cheerleaders were all in attendence, while all Penn could muster up at its last home game on Dec. 23 against Illinois-Chicago was about seven cheerleaders - not even a string quartet, and certainly no dance team.

However, I was surprised at the lack of creativity out of the UNC fans. I saw no rollouts or signs, and more importantly heard no clever chants or even taunts to Penn players, just the occasional anger toward the referees. The enormous crowd, including Presidential candidate John Edwards (though I'll take our Governor any day), got very loud at times, but was quieted often as well. After UNC had busted its lead out to 15 in the second half, you could hear Penn fans from up in the rafters chanting "let's go Duke"