As the UNC-Chapel Hill game approaches, I have high expectations, but not for our basketball team. We have a good team, but Carolina has the most talent in the nation.

My expectations lay in our fans. We should come up with more creative chants than “S-T-D, S-T-D,” the tune with which State fans serenaded Rashad McCants during our 2004 meeting with the Tar Heels.

The only reaction McCants gave fans was a look of confusion at the free-throw line and a game-winning shot late in the game. After all, this chant, which would have been in bad taste even if it had been true, was just based on a rumor. The chant was crass, unimaginative and inaccurate because STDs are things that afflict a significant portion of the population – but not McCants, at least not to our knowledge.

I have higher expectations this year, because students showed significant wit and clean humor during the Boston College home game this season, chanting “Tom O’Brien.”

I don’t mean to suggest that cheers have to be completely sportsmanlike; heckling of the road team is part of ACC basketball and part of the reason that schools like State, Duke and Maryland enjoy strong home-court advantages.

However, heckling chants should have at least some positive attributes; otherwise they make N.C. State students seem completely classless.

For example, if fans yelled a creative chant about Sean Williams’ marijuana use during the Boston College game, it might have been offensive. However, it would have been funny, original and accurate. (Williams served a suspension for marijuana use earlier this season and was recently dismissed from the team.)

Even saying something as simple as “Sean’s got the munchies” would have been better than cheering, “Dudley’s ugly.”

It may seem silly to concern myself with cheers during a basketball game, but the only time most people around the country get to see State students is in the crowd during football and basketball games.

Poor fan behavior at any university yields a negative perception of students and hurts their respective schools in the long run.

For instance, East Carolina has a good medical school and some excellent undergraduate programs, but many good students never think of going there.

I basically ruled out ECU after going to one of its football games at Carter-Finley Stadium. A hurricane flooded its stadium, and we were nice enough to our rival to let them play the game in Raleigh. Despite this generosity, most of the ECU fans I saw at the game appeared drunk, and many wore anti-State T-shirts, including a rather disgusting one that depicted our mascot, Mr. Wuf, orally pleasuring a pirate.

I was about 13 at the time, and there were much younger kids than me at the game. Several years later, I went to a summer science camp at ECU. I had a great time and learned a lot, but never even considered going to college there because of my previous experience with the students.

Our University may have the same problem if our fans don’t show more decency. Do we really want the only image of State students to be a mob chanting “STD” or making inexcusable references to Chris Paul’s recently murdered grandfather, as some fans did during the Wake Forest game in 2005?

We have some of the smartest students in the country, but our school is often characterized as a “redneck college” by outsiders, partly because some student fans act like drunken buffoons. I wonder how many intelligent high-school students have decided to go to college elsewhere in part because of unruly behavior by our fans on national TV.

UNC is our biggest rival, and I’m hoping we will come up with some creative, respectable cheers this time around. “Hansbrough’s ugly” isn’t going to cut it.

Let’s at least bring up his uncanny resemblance to a deer in headlights or mention that Roy Williams once said, “I could give a s–t about North Carolina.”

Here’s another idea: if we can’t think of any clever ways to deride our opponent, why not just stick to basic cheering?

Chanting “De-fense!” when we need a big stop or yelling at the top of our lungs would be just as effective in pumping up our team and distracting our opponents as any lewd chant I have ever heard.

E-mail Brian your UNC chant suggestions at [email protected].