With about 10 minutes left in the game I was mentally drafting a post about how pathetic the crowd was. Up until that point the Illinois contingent - and there were more of them than any visiting team I can recall at an
OSU BBall game - owned that place. They were chanting 'We can't hear you', 'Sell more tickets', and a lot of other stuff that I have never had to listen to. The 0-7 deficit didn't help, but it wasn't until less than 10 minutes left in the game that the
OSU crowd even showed up. But when they did - Wow.
Ironically, if Illinois had lost that game you could have argued it was because of their crowd. I sincerely feel that much of the noise the hometown folks were making was a response to what they had been listening to the first three quarters of the game. Those last two minutes it definitely had an effect on the play.
On another note - where the heck has Ivan Harris been? It was really when he came in that Dials went crazy and part of the reason was that he provided an offensive threat that Illinois had to react to by moving their big men out rather than packing them inside.