INDIANAPOLIS — Tenting in Krzyzewskiville ended nearly a month ago, but don’t tell that to the 660 Duke students who won the Final Four ticket lottery.
For Saturday’s Final Four game, the group of 660 was split into two. Three-hundred thirty of them were given seats on the floor behind one of the baskets—a location that sounds ideal, but in reality created difficult sight angles for students, especially shorter ones—while the other 330 were relegated to the stratosphere that is the upper deck at Lucas Oil Stadium. Each of the four schools that sent teams to Indianapolis had to abide by those rules.
Monday, though, any remaining West Virginia and Michigan State students had no choice but to sit up top, and the sections that used to belong to them were given to Duke and Butler students. In the end, the entire floor section nearest the Duke bench was fully occupied by 660 Duke students, and the same number of Butler fans were seated on the opposite side of the court.
The guarantee of a lower-level seat didn’t stop a few dozen of the hardiest students from taking the lining-up process to the extreme and sleeping outside Lucas Oil Stadium Sunday night for the right to be one of the first people in the stadium. The difference between the front row and the rows behind it sounds minimal, but because of the way the seats are set up–all student seats are located slightly below the elevated court and not raised or slanted in any way, like the bleachers in Cameron Indoor Stadium–fans did get a much clearer view of the court from the front than they could further back.
Trinity junior Greg Chatzinoff, who made the trip from Durham to Indianapolis, said he and his group of friends were seated in about the eighth row, near the middle of the student section on the south side of the stadium, for Duke’s national semifinal defeat of West Virginia. From that location, Chatzinoff said he was only able to see game action from the players’ waists and up, and he was unable to pick out much of what was going on by the far basket.
To avoid a similar fate, 42 students, including Chatzinoff, set up a mini-Krzyzewskiville that sprouted up around 9 p.m. Sunday evening. According to several students, those who spent the night sleeping in the Lucas Oil Stadium parking lot were harassed by an early-morning rain shower that forced them under the arena’s giant overhang.
“We got drenched by the rain,” Chatzinoff said. “It rained from 1:30 am to 2:30 am, drenched our sleeping bags, and we just ended up standing on the side of the stadium all night until our sleeping bag dried at 5 a.m., and then we went to bed.”
While only a handful of students chose to arrive at the stadium Sunday night, hundreds more came in waves Monday morning, and by the middle of the afternoon, the scene was a familiar one–beers being shotgunned, footballs and frisbees being tossed around, and there was even an Indianapolis Colts-themed game of the popular college-on-the-quad game cornhole. Yet another storm in the late afternoon disrupted those activities, but at that point, students were let inside the stadium.
Asked if sleeping outside had been worth it despite the challenges, Chatzinoff and others did not hesitate.
“It was very worth it,” Chatzinoff said. “One-hundred percent worth it, as long as we win.”
Duke didn’t let him—or the rest of the Blue Devil fans down—as the team beat Butler, 61-59, to secure Duke’s fourth national championship.
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