There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about fans storming the field. It’s sheer luck that nobody has been seriously injured in the SEC when it’s happened yet, and the current fines may not be good enough. However, Alabama Crimson Tide athletic director Greg Byrne went in a completely different direction with his suggestion.
Byrne recently suggested in an article on ESPN that home teams should be forced to forfeit their games if their fans storm the court or field after a win. Yes, he thinks the leap should go directly from fines to forfeiture. According to Byrne, if that penalty existed, it would stop storming the field “right then and there.”
It wouldn’t.
How long do you think it would be in a college football game before the road team’s section of fans storms the field after a loss to force the home team to forfeit? It would probably happen within the first week of SEC play. Byrne, with his suggestion, is incentivizing field-storming more than anything else.
Of course, this is personal for him. The Alabama Crimson Tide have made it a tradition for teams in football to storm the field after beating them. Even last year, with Nick Saban gone, the Tennessee Vols and Vanderbilt Commodores did it, and with this ruling, they both would have had to forfeit.
However, as is usually the case at Vandy, there were about as many Bama fans on hand for that matchup as ‘Dores fans. You don’t think that they would be the ones to storm the field after a loss so they could trigger a forfeit by the home team that beat them. Tennessee fans always outnumber Vandy fans in Nashville. Of course they could do it.
Speaking of Tennessee, the Vols just took over Columbus this past year only to see their team lose 42-17 to the Ohio State Buckeyes in the first round of the Collge Football Playoff. What if the 43 percent of Vol fans who packed the stadium decided right then to storm the field. Would OSU be eliminated from the CFP?
All major college football stadiums have sections for visiting fans, and all major college football programs have enough fans to fill those sections. That population of fans is also large enough for them to have an impactful field storming event. How could Byrne think this is a good idea?
Look, I’m not a fan of storming the field. I understand the emotions, and it adds to the beauty of the spectacle that is college football. However, there have been too many close calls, and in recent years, too many fans have had run-ins with players. So something must be done.
The answer, though, is for states to pass trespassing and rioting laws related to storming the field. If a fan does it, they should face charges. You may think it’s impossible to single people out who do it, but in this day in age that’s not true. People in crowds are singled out all the time.
We can have that debate, though. What’s not smart is a clearly emotional proposal by somebody sick of seeing people storm the field when the Alabama Crimson Tide lose a game. That’s what Byrne was doing with what he said here, and it makes absolutely no sense.
