The Virginia Tech Hokies women's basketball team generally gets the crowd pumped up with Metallica's 1991 hit "Enter Sandman," but not during their March Madness games. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) isn't allowing any music to be played in order to treat games like a "neutral event," basically meaning they don't want the home team to have more of an advantage than they already do.
However! Virginia Tech Hokies fans don't give a shit about those rules, and proceeded to chant lyrics from "Enter Sandman" anyway. NBC 12 weekend news anchor Riley Wyant posted video of the chant, saying "Let me clarify here- Virginia Tech hosted this Women’s NCAA Tournament game as a 'neutral site.
"So, the NCAA said the Hokies would be fined if they played their traditional 'Enter Sandman' entrance. So yes, the song was banned for this instance but not for usual home games."
This isn't the first time Virginia Tech has gotten extremely into "Enter Sandman." Virginia Tech's college football team crowd once chanted the song so loud that it actually registered on a seismograph. While Metallica frontman James Hetfield hasn't responded to this instance, he was pretty stoked about the football one.
"Oh it is – I tell you, even just talking about it, I get goosebumps. IT was spectacular. The VT game, everyone jumping. I mean the military, the crowd, the team. I mean, everybody. And I tell you, it has been an eight year kind of progression with it, but to be a part of their lives, to be a part of their team, and to pump people up with that, there's no way. We can site and try to write something that, 'Oh, we need a song to pump the crowd up.'
"… you can try to do that, but it's not gonna work. It's just not. So all of these things happen for a reason. It was out of our hands, out of our control. I mean, those fans of Virginia Tech, they're the ones that made that. I mean, they needed that. So they found our song and we're grateful for that. So we're grateful."
