As I’m entering my final year at the University of Utah, I am painfully aware that this is the last time I will get to see games here as a student. Over the years, I’ve attended events for nearly every sport, taken two trips down to Las Vegas for the Pac-12 Men’s Basketball Tournament, sat in the snow and stood in the rain for football games and, of course, lost count of the times I’ve traveled down to Provo to cheer for Utah and against the Team Down South. There are moments as a fan that stand out more than others, however. Although this list is not complete (and trimmed down to things rated PG), here are some of the funniest things I’ve heard at sporting events:

Announcer mistakes Arizona State for “the Wildcats”

This one didn’t even come from the audience. During a gymnastics meet against Arizona State earlier this year, the announcer prompted the crowd to cheer for the Wildcats — the Wildcats, as in not the Sun Devils, as in ASU’s rival team. Of course, everyone caught the mistake, which was both surprising and hilarious.

This goes right along with the time when someone yelled, “Wildcats? More like mildcats” in a game versus Arizona. In other words, there is no love lost between Utah and Arizona’s Pac-12 schools.

Anything the band says

First time in the Huntsman Center? I recommend listening to the band. Their taunts are the most random, most consistent and funniest you’ll hear. I’m thinking specifically of the seal cutout with its accompanying “Look at my seal!” or, in volleyball games, when it’s silent, the “What’s your major?” Most of the remarks are completely random (“your shoes don’t match”; “your shoe’s untied”; “you missed a shot? That was your shoe”), which is why they’re so funny. Look at their cutouts. Listen to what they’re saying. Most importantly, go along with it.

“You look like you have a mortgage.”

Simple. Stunning. Absolutely destructive. This is an insult from a men’s basketball game. If you haven’t been to a game, then you don’t know that many members of the MUSS consider their main goal to come up with the most disarming and clever insult possible. Here is the magic of this line: it is so simple, so lacking a punchline or a joke, that you realize it wasn’t meant to be a joke at all. It’s an honest observation, and somehow that is so much worse. Is having a mortgage bad? Not necessarily.

It probably means you own a home. That’s cool, I guess. But if you picture someone telling you this line, do you think of it as a good thing? No. No, reader, you do not. You must live with the fact that some undergrad — who probably wasn’t sure what a mortgage is — looked at your face and had one thought: that you look like the embodiment of the middle class. They were likely unaware of what they said (which, again, makes this line all the more brutal), and only realized what they were thinking when they said it out loud when just enough people were listening. I don’t remember who we were playing when I heard this line, but it was definitely intended for someone who looks like TJ Haws or Evan Boudreaux.

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