Tom Knauer Assistant Sports Editor

In the battle long waged by UA students (past but mostly present) for the reintroduction of a student section along the McKale Center's floor, the main argument amounts to this: "Everyone else has one. Why don't we?"

Indeed - why doesn't Arizona have a student section? Its men's basketball team has been the toast of the Pacific 10 Conference since the 1987-1988 season, the year McKale's last student section was eliminated. Yet it remains the only team in the conference to have no sort of organized student force tracing the action on the court.

Despite having the largest seating capacity of any basketball venue in the Pac-10, at more than 15,000, few UA students ever sniff courtside seats. Instead, those gaps remain filled by a growing fleet of deep-pocketed alumni.

This has spawned an ethical battle between two factors thought seemingly in coalescence: money and competition.

As baseball's New York Yankees have established in recent years, dollar signs do often amount to victories. In Arizona's case, this principle holds firm: since the start of the '87 season, the Wildcats have won 80 percent of their games and reached the Final Four four times, winning the national championship in 1997.

Any major athletics program would welcome such success. Yet to the many thousands of UA students over the last two decades who have never sat closer than Tedy and Heidi Bruschi, the mark is a deceiving, ignominious reminder that the rich indeed rule and suggests that a stoic, reserved McKale Center crowd, even filled to the brim with geriatrics-in-the-making, will never bring the intensity the program needs to stay among the nation's elite teams.

Does that really matter?

While it seems cruel that students may sit for free through 90 minutes of freezing rain to watch the football team lose but can't crowd the court in the climate-controlled McKale Center for tens to hundreds of dollars a season, the reality is clear: Complain all you want, but don't count on any changes - at least not any time soon.

Can that be true, in a country now committed to spreading freedom of expression and other associated liberties to all regions of the world? Yes, and here's why: As much as students like to think they can hold a three-day sit-in before McKale's front doors and expect color-coded T-shirts and special ushers to guide them come the next home game, one factor, and one alone, will continue to drive McKale's seating patterns.

To quote Deion Sanders: It must be the money.

Creating a new student section would require a vast financial restructuring within Arizona's athletic department. To crowd students into even one part of the court-level seating would alienate season-ticket holders - and not just the ones whose seats are being taken - causing an ugly shift in the amount of funds taken in and how those funds are distributed.

In short, it's a matter of when, not if, a loud, raucous student section will encourage alumni and other ticket holders to take their money and spend it elsewhere. They don't want the cheap seats, and neither do the students.

So the solution is, keep things as they are - for now. This will infuriate many of you, who probably can't imagine a fellow student "selling out" to the detriment of the group, but let's be realistic about it. Thanks to the success it's had for so many years, Arizona will always be a major power in men's college basketball, even if the decibel levels at home occasionally fall short.

The thought of having a rowdy, red-splashed student section is obviously preferred here on campus, even if only as a sort of Cameron Crazy envy. The time will come when a student section is revived, perhaps as early as next season if the certain cards get played right.

In the meantime, pack into McKale, anyway. As Thursday's victory over Washington showed, quantity can make up for quality. And isn't winning the big games what we're all fighting about in the first place?

Tom Knauer is a journalism sophomore. He can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.