Just imagine the scene.
It’s fourth-and-18 with 10 seconds left, and top-ranked Georgia is down to its last play on the road as a conference rival’s fans begin to swarm the walls surrounding the playing field. The tens of thousands in attendance can taste victory and are preparing to overtake the field as soon as the clock hits zero.
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Kirby Smart takes a timeout to prepare one final play, and as hundreds of security guards gather and prepare for an onslaught, an idle silence takes over the stadium, a lone voice emerges.
Everyone! Wait! If we do this, two years from now we might have to play these guys on the road!
Think of the lost revenue! Think of the competitive disadvantage!
Slowly, the realization washes over the crowd. Cooler heads prevail. The Bulldogs’ Hail Mary falls incomplete, but the fans keep the celebration in the stands. Georgia’s players safely make their way to the locker room without incident.
If that feels like fantasy, that’s because it is.
But it’s a fantasy that, in theory, a working group inside the SEC is hoping to make reality, first reported Monday by Sports Illustrated and confirmed by The Athletic.
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A trio of athletic directors whose teams would also be most likely to face fans rushing the field or court on the road — Alabama’s Greg Byrne, Georgia’s Josh Brooks and Kentucky’s Mitch Barnhart — are proposing that future home games be flipped to road games as punishment, rather than the escalating fines that have become increasingly modest for athletic departments in the era of booming television money.
It’s an idea born out of the right spirit. Field-stormings are powder kegs, and college sports has been fortunate to avoid a truly tragic incident as a result of them. Still, there have been ugly incidents, and I was on the field in 2011 when multiple Oklahoma State fans suffered broken legs and ankles trying to jump from the stands at Boone Pickens Stadium, and it took paramedics too long to be able to provide care and remove them from the crush of the crowd.
The potential for true tragedy is real and palpable.
But academic evidence shows that harsher penalties like this working group proposes do little to nothing to disincentivize undesired behaviors.
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Daniel Nagin’s oft-cited 2013 paper “Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century” studied five decades of crime data and confirmed what common sense and the fallout from the decades-long, failed war on drugs have already shown society. Stricter punishments don’t prevent undesired behaviors and can even produce other unforeseen circumstances. Plenty of other research throughout history has reached similar conclusions.
What Nagin’s paper did find is that the certainty of punishment was far more effective than the severity of the punishment. But fans who enter the playing field after a game can rest relatively assured they will not be individually punished for doing so if the practice continues as it has for decades in college sports.
If schools guaranteed that every fan who entered the field would be arrested and prosecuted and backed it up with results, storming the field would disappear. But it occurs, in part, because of emotion and the realization that fans know they can’t punish them all.
And unless individual fans are being destructive (to things other than goal posts) or violent, they can be confident they’ll be spending the night in their own bed, not in a jail cell.
Campus security has little to no power, and even local police have a seemingly wink-wink arrangement with the common practice. Last season, I followed the goal posts as they left Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tenn. Most of them made it into the Tennessee River, but police confiscated one portion in the stadium and another outside the stadium.
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Few fans faced arrest, and the only arrest I witnessed resulted from a fan repeatedly pushing police who were trying to gain possession of one portion of the goal post.
The vast majority of other fans were taking photos with the goal posts on the way to their cars as police stood by, careful not to photo bomb the memorable snapshots.
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If campuses want police to take a more aggressive approach in stopping the behavior as it happens, it’s fair to wonder if that would produce an even less palatable outcome for everyone involved.
Storming the field is fun. I did it multiple times as a student. It’s memorable. But attempting to prevent a practice that can be dangerous for fans, players and coaches is a noble pursuit. These attempts to be proactive before real tragedy happens are worthwhile.
Trying to discourage storming the field is the right move, but in a sport driven by emotion and euphoric moments, it might be an impossible task.
All this particular strategy would do is make sure a team like Alabama or Georgia, after a down year with a few too many road losses, gets to play seven of its nine SEC games at home two years later.
(Photo of South Carolina fans rushing the field after defeating Tennessee on Nov. 19, 2022: Austin McAfee / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
