LAS VEGAS, NV — For any Syracuse Orange fans who watched the Players Era Festival, you may have noticed one group donning the iconic color in full for the team’s first two games of the tournament. Not only were they just rooting for the team, but none of the four even went to Syracuse University.
So, why did brothers Nate and Jake Kurtz plus their friends Tate Thompson and Elliot Keller wear all orange, buy courtside seats for two games in the Sin City and root for the 315? TNIAAM spoke to the group
directly to find out.
“I saw somebody doing this at a Knicks game like five years ago,” Jake said. “I told my buddies that we had to do the same thing, and we’ve been talking about this for like six months.”
It doesn’t get more special than this in the world of college basketball, right? To the Syracuse fans out there, as we spoke to them more, their story got even more wild.
Nate and Jake were both originally from New York, then moved to Montana. That’s where Keller and Thompson are both from. Keller said he worked at the same company Jake worked at, and that’s how the four of them got to know each other.
So yes, you read that right: the four biggest superfans that attended Syracuse’s first two games inside MGM Grand Garden Arena never attended SU or lived in the 315, reside over a thousand-plus miles away from Upstate and only half of them are actually from the Empire State.
“We just figured like, we should just go courtside and be idiots,” Thompson said.
Another wild aspect of their story: the entire bit almost didn’t happen.
Fans had to pay a pretty penny just to even be in the arena. For context, to see part of Wednesday night’s slate in the non-100 and 200 sections, the average ticket is at least a few hundred dollars. This group paid for the same row of four just next to one of the baskets for not just one game, but two.
Which means, they had to budget correctly:
“We spent all our money on the tickets, so we bought the jerseys from China,” Jake said.
The group emphasized how those jerseys literally arrived the day before Syracuse’s first game in Las Vegas, which was against No. 3 Houston.
Of course, each of the four had to wear a different one, and they represented all different numbers, players and eras.
Thompson went with the Buddy Boeheim jersey, who he said he “loves” along with Jim Boeheim. Keller took an old-school approach by rocking with Stephen Thompson’s jersey, the former guard who played over 130 games for the program in the late-eighties. Jake went with the Anthony legacy 7, while his brother Nate went with current Syracuse player and walk-on Noah Lobdell.
Even though the Orange ultimately did not win versus the Cougars, Keller said it was pretty to see an overtime game where they sat and in that venue. While he doesn’t have any specific Syracuse basketball memories, he can at least add that one to his list.
Because, even though ’Cuse came up short, many of you gamblers out there know the saying in Vegas: good teams win, great teams cover. That’s exactly what the Orange did against one of the best teams in the country. Although they have been to Vegas plenty of times, the superfans couldn’t have been more happy at least with that result.
“Luckily, we can buy our flights home because Syracuse covered Monday night.”
