Town Hall Quotes From Last Night

[El Curioso Impertinente]

I'd love for us to play the Incubus' song, "Are You In". It's the perfect song for Rutgers.

 

[17Q66]

I feel like the on-field success is what screwed it up around 2006/7 because the student section started filling up with a lot of people who didn't go to football games previously, so they didn't know how the chant was supposed to sound.

Even the people who know how the cheer is "supposed to go" are a part of screwing it up. Yours is a logical conclusion, but it's not really sustained by the facts-in-evidence.

It's got more to do with an emptier stadium, filled at the sidelines from the 50 and thinning as it heads toward the end zones, compared to a totally different stadium alignment today.

The cheerleaders would love to be getting this right, but there needs to be a whole different "cheer alignment" with the student section in the end zone, and a willingness to teach it at orientation.
You're not really going to be able to control the rest of what the stadium does, so you're going to have to deal with whatever they do organically, and "lead" the student section in whatever is going to work with that. In this case, the students should be the "R," and they should be held by the cheerleaders -- like horses at the starting gate -- from responding with the next "R" until they're good and ready. But the problem with that, is that the cheer is going to be a completely different experience from one end of the stadium to the other.

It's a good argument for coming up with a completely new cheer, so it's not confused with the old one. "Upstream ... RED TEAM" It also helps that this is polysyllabic, because it will naturally slow down the call-and-response, and it's one of the reasons that "We Are ... PENN STATE" is so much more successful than "R/U."

 

[17Q66]

Fix the Chant by placing a huge R and a U in the stadium. When the "R" is lit, we say "R", and when the "U" is lit we say "U". Ge'ez.

People don't "cheer" that way.

 

[17Q66]

One possibility would be to change the chant.

Call and response: "Upstream ... Red Team."

 

[robcac26]

I agree. The chant only got screwed up the last 2 years. Another solution is pipe in the chant R U on the speakers real loud and people will follow.

It has been off since 2008 or 2009. I was a student at the time and there was an attempt to slow it down at the first home game of one of those seasons. People distributed little cards that explained that there should be a pause between letters, and I was excited to see that there was an effort to fix this, but unfortunately most of the other students around me just scoffed at it because they didn't want to be told that they were doing it wrong.

I think 99% of the people who care about the R-U chant are on this board and that most fans think it's fine. I liked the old, slow R-U chant, but not enough to invest more than the next 60 seconds on it. Here goes.

If people really want the slow cheer, the best way is to use the scoreboard and the cheerleaders, together, where the scoreboard "calls" for the R by the students, then counts down 3, 2, 1, and then "calls" for the U by everyone else, in unison with the cheerleaders, and so on.

I highly doubt this will work since everyone doing the RU chant is facing the part of the stadium they are pointing their arms towards, so nobody will be looking at the scoreboard or the cheerleaders.