Home court advantage is a force to be reckoned with in college basketball, especially when a team has fans as passionate and as rowdy as West Virginia’s. It’s probably one of the reasons why the Mountaineers were undefeated at home coming into the game today and why they only lost one home game last season. There’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of playing at home, but there is a difference between cheers that distract the visiting team and cheers that target the visiting team in a cheap, offensive way. Some of the Mountaineers’ cheers tonight fell into the later category.

I can’t, in good conscience, take real issue with the “Sapp is crap” cheer. It’s hard to take it seriously when the player in question nails the game-winning three with 6 seconds left to round out a 15-point night. But I will say this: is that really the best you can do? “Sapp is crap?” Really?

However, I was bothered by the second, blatantly homophobic cheer picked up by ESPN’s cameras: “Roy likes boys.” I know that it’s not uncommon for people to thoughtlessly toss around homophobic slurs in conversation. But for an entire student section to shout something like “Roy likes boys” displays a lack of class beyond anything I’ve seen at a college basketball game. And it doesn’t even rhyme.

Admittedly, Georgetown students took some flack for the “Where’s my laptop?” cheer at the UConn game (I thought the cheer was dumb but not offensive, for the record) and the sheets that Hoya Blue makes for the student section do sound like they were written by catty middle schoolers. But nothing the Georgetown student section has done is as offensive as “Roy likes boys.” At least, in the end, the good guys came out on top.

Update:  Tim Fernholz just reminded me of a similar incident at Georgetown two years ago regarding a sign reading “RIDICULOUSLY GAY JJ”, referring to Duke player JJ Redick.