Joseph Stafford WCNC Intern

It seems that from the moment that I stepped on the light-rail and rode to the Bobcats Arena, there was absolute pandemonium. The train was packed with ACC fans from all different schools boasting of their teams' accolades and focusing on their rivals' failures.

There were seas of different people scrapping for position to get inside Bobcats Arena. Anyone caught unaware may have been caught in a stampede.

I have never seen blue, gold, black, red, orange, white, and green on so many people since I last went to the Carnival parade in Atlanta. Tickets were hard to come by, and the scalpers knew this long before the tournament started. I watched as they hustled to buy and sell tickets for profit from desperate fans seeking to see their favorite team play.

Fortunately, no physical displays of violence occurred in my presence, though I saw plenty of verbal assaults happen from those fans who realized that they had been hustled.
I heard the negatives and positives of the tournament being held in Charlotte by the fans as they held conversations with each other.

Some fans believed that it was great to have the ACC tournament back in Charlotte because of the new light-rail system, the hotels, the great restaurants Uptown, and the easy access to just about everything in the city. The only negative thing that I heard was about the arena being smaller than the one in Greensboro, N.C., but I guess you win some and you lose some.

The tournament is famous for having the major teams in the country come and fight it out for the prized ACC championship and an automatic bid into the NCAA tournament.

I may be a bit biased seeing that I was born and raised in ACC country, but the ACC is the hardest conference in basketball to survive in. There are so many good teams, and even the ones that are at the bottom of the ACC can beat just about any other team outside of their conference. This makes for a heated tournament because anybody can predict a huge upset where a No. 8 seed may beat a No. 1 seed in double overtime by one point.

That is the type of tournament this is. People will definitely be dancing in the streets. I hope that the ACC plans on staying here for many years to come because Charlotte is the perfect place to have it.

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