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‘This house will be different’: Stories about the Assembly Hall crowd and how everything could change

Chuck Crabb pauses mid-sentence, just for a second, to carefully choose his words. After 43 years as the Indiana basketball public address announcer, he’s seen a lot. But never an Assembly Hall anomaly quite like this. No one has. What does the so-called Carnegie Hall of college basketball look like… without any fans?

“This house will be different,” Crabb says.

Crabb leans back in a chair in his new Assembly Hall office. There are cardboard boxes and pictures of the cheerleading team, which Crabb has been working with since 1979, still littered on the floor from his move over the summer.