Basketball at the Pit: Lobos Tip Off in One of College Hoops' Great Buildings
The Pit is loud in every month, but November is when the noise is pure promise. The Lobos open the season in their famous below-ground arena, and New Mexico State waits down I-25.
There are louder buildings in college basketball, but there is no building quite like the Pit. Dug into the ground off Avenida Cesar Chavez, the University of New Mexico's arena puts its crowd on top of the court and its noise into the floorboards of visiting teams, and November is when a new Lobos season first hears it at full voice.
Tipoff season at the Pit runs on ritual: the student section finding its voice, the band in the corner, the walk down the ramps as the court opens below you. For New Mexico fans, the building is not a venue but an inheritance, handed from the era of packed houses decades ago to freshmen arriving this fall.
The season ahead will be graded, as all Lobos seasons are, on the Mountain West grind and the games that decide March. Early nonconference play is for rotations, newcomers, and the coaching staff's experiments; the Pit's veterans know to enjoy November's hope and save their loudest judgment for the conference race in January and February.
Down I-25, New Mexico State's program in Las Cruces opens its own season with the Aggies' faithful — and the annual meetings between the state's two programs remain circled on calendars in both cities, a rivalry that divides households and unites the state's basketball winter.
No scores yet, no standings, nothing settled: that is the gift of the season's first week. The Pit will fill, the Lobos will run out of the tunnel, and Albuquerque's longest-running winter argument — how good is this team, really — begins again on schedule, exactly as it should.
