Let’s go Peay: Behind the best cheer of the NCAA tourney

Austin Peay head coach Dave Loos cuts down the net after defeating UT Martin in the championship of the Ohio Valley Conference basketball tournament. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File) If your favorite team didn’t make the NCAA tournament and you’re looking for a team to cheer for, we have a suggestion.

How about focusing your rooting interests on the team whose fans chant “Let’s go pee!” at all of its games? Well, it’s not “let’s go pee” exactly. It’s “let’s go Peay,” for Austin Peay State University, the champions of the Ohio Valley Conference Tournament.

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“Let’s go Peay!” isn’t cheered in a sarcastic way, either. Sure, fans of the Clarksville, Tennessee-based university understand the underlying silliness (and bathroom humor) of the chant, but they have pride in this cheer.

Seriously. Watch this commercial:

Governors head coach Dave Loos told NPR that the cheer is no joke. In fact, NPR says the “Let’s go Peay!” slogan is “on banners all over campus.”

“Sometimes people will make light of that, but you know, it’s pretty serious to people around here,” Loos said.

Added senior guard Khalil Davis: “We could even be down 10, but right when we hear ‘let’s go Peay’ from our crowd, it just, you know, turns us all up because we know that that let’s go Peay lets us know that the crowd is still on our side no matter how much we’re down.”

The cheer goes back to the 1970s when James “Fly” Williams, a New York City streetball legend, was a guard for the Governors.

“They used to say ‘the fly’s open, let’s go Peay. We’re going to Peay on you. We’re going to Peay on you,’” Williams told NPR.

Potty jokes aside, the Governors were the No. 8 seed in the OVC tournament and pulled off four upsets in four days to punch their ticket to the big dance. And as a No. 16 seed in the South Region, Peay will square off Thursday against mighty Kansas, the top seed in the entire tournament, in Des Moines, Iowa.

It’s obviously a long shot for the Governors to pull off the upset against the Jayhawks, but if the first 16 seed upset over a No. 1 seed in tournament history is going to happen, it should probably come from a team with a chant about peeing, right?

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