Fans Have Too Much License, and the NCAA Had Better Crack Down NOW...

"The fan is sacred, even as sports are. He pays the freight, thus he is an entitled being. The media people tell him this every day. Therefore, once within the arena, his emotions whetted by the Sports Syndrome, the fan adopts what John Stewart Mill found to be the classic confusion in the American thought process, the confusion between Liberty and License—a natural and probable consequence of which is fan violence."

-- Howard Cosell, I Never Played The Game, 1985

It was bad enough with the whole Marcus Smart incident.

There now appears to be a trend opening up, as the last few weeks have now seen a pair of NCAA Division I games have major fan incidents disrupting the proceedings.

February 27, 2014.  New Mexico State has just been defeated by Utah Valley, 66-61, in a game which broke the regular-season conference tie between the two schools.

At the end of the game, Utah Valley fans decided to storm the court, and this occurred:



Pissed off at the loss, KC Ross-Miller of New Mexico State threw the ball in an attempt to injure Holton Hunsaker of Utah Valley, the son of the coach.  As fingers were being pointed, the horn sounds, and Utah Valley's fans, apparently independent of the assault, attempted to storm the court to congratulate the team on their big win.

That's when this got ugly.

One New Mexico State player apparently throws a punch into the crowd, and a second New Mexico State player has to be forcibly yanked off the pile from joining him.  A Utah Valley fan retaliates with a punch of his own.

Seth Greenburg of ESPN called this inevitable.

All you need to know to have me agree with this is the quote I gave you above, from Howard Cosell, nearly 30 years ago.

It appears the only sanctions given were:

• Two games to Ross-Miller for the ball-throwing.
• One game to New Mexico State's Renaldo Dixon for throwing a punch into the crowd.

No sanctions to Utah Valley for any fan misconduct.

THIS is why these actions will continue until you get an incident which will dwarf the infamous "Malice in the Palace" riot.

And that leads us to the more recent incident, which reminds me of an situation I was involved in many years back which I discussed on a blog post regarding the Smart incident.

March 6, 2014.  Hawaii is playing California-Santa Barbara.

The Hawaii coach, feeling he just got jobbed, gets up off the bench and takes the court.  A technical foul is (correctly) called on him.

That's not the incident.

The video is on the Deadspin link (most all the YouTube direct videos are effectively ads for pirate-sport sites and the like by referring to the video off-site, and I'm not going to play that -- and ESPN didn't, as a function of discussion, put up a highlight video of their own on YouTube, leaving the same video on their own article on the incident).

A California-Santa Barbara fan then is able to walk down a flight of stairs, climb over the table on the other side of the court, walk onto the court, go all the way across the court to get in the face of the Hawaii coach, before being restrained, but he is actually able to get off the court and up the stairs before security can intervene.

Besides hideous security on the part of UCSB there, how is that not a technical foul on UCSB?  How is that not grounds for "Clear the Gym or Forfeit the Game"?

To give you an idea of how ridiculous things have gotten in American sports fandom:  In a non-scientific poll with the article, ESPN SportsNation asked whether the idiot should be expelled from UCSB.  Out of almost 30,000 votes as of the time I post this, over 40% of those polled believed he should not be expelled.

Wow.