When you promise old-fashioned hate, don’t be surprised when you get it

[greybeard58]

When you promise old-fashioned hate, don’t be surprised when you get it
For as long as colleges have had rivals, hatred has been manufactured for those down the road. When that hate begets violence, players usually take the blame.

December 4, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST
5 min

Michigan and Ohio State were each fined $100,000 by the Big Ten after a fight broke out on the field after Saturday's game in Columbus. (Adam Cairns/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Con)

Column by Kevin B. Blackistone
It was 13 years ago this month when Cincinnati and Xavier leveled suspensions against four basketball players each after a fight ended their annual intracity rivalry. A county prosecutor threatened to file criminal charges. It was ugly. Then-Xavier athletic director Mike Bobinski offered a sobering observation: We were all to blame.

“This nonsense has to stop,” Bobinski pleaded after the game in 2011 descended into fisticuffs on national TV. “It’s at every level, from our local media, to our fans, to us, to everybody.”

Bobinski’s comprehensive criticism of extracurricular confrontations in college sports took on new resonance Saturday in the aftermath of similar scenes at college football games. After Michigan upset Ohio State on the Buckeyes’ home turf, a Wolverines player attempted to plant a Michigan flag at midfield, which incensed enough Buckeyes that, within a minute or two, a brawl broke out that ended with police pepper-spraying both sides. After North Carolina State topped North Carolina in Chapel Hill, a few Wolfpack players tried to plant their flag on the field, too, which started a shoving match before punches were thrown. The Alabama-Auburn game wasn’t even over when two opposing players tangled at a play’s end, which was enough to spark a skirmish between the teams that led to the throwing of hands.


0:59

Tensions boiled over in Columbus Ohio after the 7-5 Michigan Wolverines upset their long-time rivals, the 10-2 Ohio State Buckeyes. (Video: Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post, Photo: USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Con/The Washington Post)
The Big Ten fined its flagship schools, Michigan and Ohio State, $100,000 each for violating the league’s sportsmanship policy.

But most everyone who pointed a finger, such as ESPN’s main college football voice, Kirk Herbstreit, seemed to do so only at the players.


“Any conference commissioner who had a team or teams involved in the postgame fights owes it to his conference and THE SPORT of CFB to study the film very closely and sit anyone who was involved in being an aggressor to help escalate the situation,” Herbstreit posted on X. “Sit those involved for their next game. Whether it’s a bowl game or playoff game. These dudes need consequences — for their own good!”

What that has meant in the past is a demonization of the athletes at best, the criminalization of them at worst. Teenagers and early 20-somethings turned momentarily into pugilists only to attract the ire of commentators and others who demand they be the ones, the only ones, disciplined for such abhorrent behavior.

The Hamilton County prosecutor in Ohio decided against charging the Cincinnati-Xavier players with crimes for turning into combatants. But two years ago, after Michigan and Michigan State players got into a fight with helmets swinging and cleats kicking in the Michigan Stadium tunnel after their Battle for the Paul Bunyan Trophy, seven Michigan State players were charged with crimes, including one player who was pinned with a felony.

The Big Ten tagged a $100,000 fine on Michigan State for its players’ actions. But it only reprimanded Michigan for not protecting teams entering and departing the field, which a cynic might say was stagecraft for the histrionics that broke out, highlighted the heat of the rivalry and made for TV clips and conversation around the country centered mostly on the athletes — and not the adults in charge.

All of which brings me back to Bobinski, now Purdue’s athletic director, who suggested while at Xavier that a round-up-the-perpetrators response as echoed by Herbstreit comes from a myopic view of college sports, particularly when it concerns the contact sport of basketball and collision sport of football. It ignores the sporting biosphere they live in, one fed by ceaseless promotions of us vs. them that gin up games into near apocalyptic events.

The Michigan-Ohio State rivalry, played since the late 19th century, is called The Game. Nothing else matters, of course. Georgia outlasted Georgia Tech in eight overtimes Friday in a rivalry called Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate. That is not to be confused with 100 Miles of Hate, which happens when Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky are on the same field.

Bedlam is Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma State. Pittsburgh-West Virginia is known as the Backyard Brawl.

There are a bevy of Battles, such as of the Brazos, or for the Cannon, the Iron Skillet, the Old Brass Spittoon, the Old Mountain Jug, the Golden Boot, the Golden Horseshoe.

There’s the War on I-4 between South Florida and Central Florida. The Border War between Kansas and Missouri. The Holy War between BYU and Utah.

And against it all is some expectation, it appears, that the actors playing it out before us should do so while keeping in mind that all the bellowing surrounding them is just hype. Nothing more. It’s just the manufactured theatrics leading to the real thing.

For a moment, some heeded Bobinski’s appeal. The Cincinnati-Xavier basketball game that pitted the two schools a few miles apart within the city of Cincinnati changed its name to the Crosstown Classic. It had all but forever been called the Crosstown Shootout, a name that, in hindsight, seemed to suggest, if not inspire, what a spectator should expect from the intracity rivalry, exactly what unfolded in Xavier’s home arena that early December weekend in 2011. But it reverted to the Shootout after only a few years.

The Oregon-Oregon State football game that has been played since 1894 was named the Civil War for 91 years until 2020 when, after the uprisings following the police killing of George Floyd and at the urging of former Oregon quarterback Dennis Dixon, things changed.

“We must all recognize the power of words and the symbolism associated with the Civil War,” Oregon Athletic Director Rob Mullens said in a statement in 2020. “This mutual decision is in the best interests of both schools … We look forward to our continued and fierce instate rivalry with Oregon State in all sports.”

Oregon beat Oregon State, 49-14, this season. Without incident.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2 ... ate-fight/