Eighteen of the 28 people in line ninety minutes before last Thursday’s Washington game were seniors. Two were freshman.

It’s been that way the whole season.

“I feel like a lot of younger students love basketball but aren’t into Stanford basketball,” senior Tim Caflisch said. “When we were freshmen, we remembered 26-0, we remembered Josh Childress and there were a lot of RAs who had gone through it and pumped us up. But if I see someone playing at the rec center and they’re not at the games, that’s unacceptable.”

In an immediate sense, it will be the Sixth Man section, and by extension the basketball squad, that suffers when Caflisch and the dozens of diehard senior fans graduate this June. But basketball’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The overall makeup of the student body is changing, as plenty of then-seniors lamented in this newspaper last year, and as plenty of recent alums have been saying for the last five, ten years. Stanford’s a little less party and a little more professional, a little less basketball, a little more biochem, a little more serious and a little less fun than it was just a few short years ago.

The Graying Sixth Man

The graduation of its most devoted fans is bad news for a student section that’s already slid from among the best in the country to the Pac-10’s second tier. Before you disagree, sit in the crowd at Oregon or Washington. Or just show up to next year’s Arizona and UCLA games. Many students I spoke with think that those hallowed front-row bleachers will be a third empty, even for the biggest of rivalries.

“It’s going to suck next year,” said Vikram Arumilli ‘07, now an MS&E co-term. “It’ll be like the Dodgers — people will walk in for the third inning and walk out in the seventh.”

If Arumilli is wrong next year, check back the season after that, if last Thursday’s headcount was any indication. Because the younger the class, the fewer of its students who were in line when the doors opened at 6 p.m., an hour before tip-off.

The only group bigger than the seniors were the alums and grad students, a sad reminder of what this section once was. Ask an alum and he’ll tell you it was not long ago that people who showed up an hour early would get turned away: the student section was already full.

“Our fans don’t deserve a good basketball team,” Caflisch said. “People just expect it and don’t support the team anymore.”

A Student Body in Transition

But does the decline of Sixth Man show something far more serious? Does it show that the student body is changing? Does it show that today’s Stanford students are too stressed, too busy or just plain unable to pack a gymnasium for two hours of good, old-fashioned fun?

I’m of two minds on this.

On the one hand, just because basketball has served as my grade’s water cooler doesn’t mean that younger grades can’t bond over other activities.

Far more freshmen went to football games this year, now that the team has finally found its pulse. They hang out at the Axe & Palm, which we never had, and flock in their dorm groupings to the same row parties that every class does.

Two years as a freshman RA have painfully reminded me for quite some time that plenty of my freshmen are cooler than I and many of my fellow seniors are now, let alone three years ago. And I don’t want to become the world’s youngest curmudgeon at the ripe old age of 21.

“I think it’s pretty early to judge us versus the senior class,” said freshman Brett Buchalter, one of the two freshmen outside Maples an hour and a half before the game (not incidentally, the only other one was dragged out by his senior older brother). “I think every group, once they’re seniors, feels it’s not as cool now. It was the same in high school.”

Good for Buchalter, and good for the 20 other freshmen who’ll take offense to this piece. You’re not the problem. Now clone yourselves ten times over, because you’re becoming an endangered species on the Farm.

“I feel like in Larkin my freshman year, we were concerned with striking a balance between academics and social life,” said Darren Franich, a 2007 alum who wrote columns in The Daily lamenting the change in Stanford’s culture. “Three years later, the freshmen seemed less concerned with the social part. I don’t know if it’s new rules on alcohol or just that they admit more hyper-intensive type-A people each year because more people keep applying and there’s less room for the troublemakers.”

Like Franich, many students are quick to blame an administrative push against alcohol for making our student body look less like a state school’s and more like MIT’s by the year. For whatever reason, the difference between the classes of 2010 and 2011 is vast.

“I just feel like more freshmen last year came to games,” sophomore Jessica Sellers said. “I definitely feel this year they’re not as ‘Whoo!’ We’re trying with the Stanford Turf game, but I just don’t feel it.”

When they write the epitaph for the Sixth Man section, that will be the first line. Why camp out for the Arizona game when there are IHUM papers to proofread, labs looking for research assistants, pre-med societies to join? And looking at their resumes and their grade-point averages, it’s obvious what these freshman have gained.

But what have they lost in return?

“It’s something I look forward to all year, and whenever we’re together in other arenas we always bring it up,” said senior Carolyn Celio of camping out with Caflisch and their friends since their freshman year in Roble. “I was asked about my time commitments at a Row manager interview, and they laughed out loud, but I said this was one of my top priorities.

“It’s the time I get to see this group. It’s our time.”

What’s indisputable is that, for better or worse, Sixth Man won’t be the same after this year. But make no mistake: this campus has been changing for some time.