Bad sports, good sports: Michigan State fans riot after big win
People are bad. Not all people, of course, but a lot of them. Maybe “bad” is not quite the word I am seeking…perhaps “stupid” is closer to the mark. This is the case particularly when you get a whole lot of them together and something either really good or really bad happens. Michigan State beat Ohio State to win the Big Ten title on Saturday in a thrilling game. Afterward, a large group of students set fire to a whole bunch of stuff and flipped over a car in East Lansing. I just don’t get it.
During my morning drive to work each day, if Howard Stern goes to a commercial while I am still in the car, I switch on a college football talk show hosted by a guy named Bill King. At the top of each hour, he has a little recorded bit that plays that is a bunch of snippets from his show and from other sources cobbled together with some music behind it…all humorous stuff. One of the cuts is Bill discussing this exact phenomenon and mocking it. He says ”when I get happy, I want to blow stuff up. I want to burn things and turn over cop cars.” It sounds so ludicrous, and yet here is another example of it happening in the real world. I believe that I am as passionate as any sports fan there is, and yet there is absolutely nothing in me that is even remotely tempted to destroy things when my team wins or loses. I have been known to yell and scream, jump up and down, even throw myself on the floor occasionally. A win can make me happy for a long period of time, and a loss can send me into a major funk, but neither could ever cause me to try to participate in flipping a car, no matter how many people around me were doing so.
I imagine there have been many studies about this sort of group behavior, and I can not claim to have read any of them. I have to assume that some of the people involved in this sort of thing are not actually unintelligent, but instead are just overcome with emotion and energy that they simply do not know how to handle, particularly when they are surrounded by a bunch of other people trying to deal with the same thing. It is sad, though, that this sort of behavior has actually become predictable and expected under any circumstances, but especially when it is caused by something as ultimately trivial as a sporting event. Yes, this game was huge for the whole Michigan State football program and for the school itself, really. As a result of this idiocy, though, a bunch of students will have criminal records and some may spend some time in jail. Sure, I did some dopey stuff when I was in college. None of it landed me in jail, though. Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt. I guess there will be another opportunity for that to happen sometime very soon.
Bad sports, continued:
2) Upset that others at the party were not as devastated as she was about Alabama’s loss to Auburn last week, Adrian Laroze Briskey shot and killed a woman who had been joking that the loss was not as bad as if the NBA’s Miami Heat had lost. I wonder if she was in East Lansing on Saturday.
3) A basketball game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Minnesota Timberwolves that was scheduled to be played in Mexico City on Wednesday was postponed shortly before tip-off due to a whole lot smoke inside the arena caused by a malfunctioning generator.
4) If you saw the press conference about Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston held Thursday by Willie Meggs, a state attorney in Tallahassee, I hope you were as disturbed as I was by the tone of the whole event. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that there was an alleged sexual crime here, Meggs and some reporters thought that jokes and laughter were appropriate to the occasion.
5) I know that people love offense in football, but I still can’t get into games where no defense is played. Auburn beat Missouri in the SEC Championship game on Saturday by a score of 59-42. Blech. That’s a college basketball score, not a football score.
6) Superstar running back Adrian Peterson, of the Minnesota Vikings, hurt his ankle during his team’s game against the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday and left the game. Afterward, he badmouthed the fans of the Ravens as well as the game officials, complaining about snowballs being thrown and about penalties with which he disagreed. Peterson is a great player, but this made him look pretty small, especially after his team lost.
Good sports:
1) The Colorado Buffaloes had lost 19 straight basketball games to conference rival Kansas. On Saturday, they broke that streak in style, as Askia Booker hit a running three-pointer at the buzzer to win the game, 75-72.
2) Tom Brady continues to amaze. With the New England Patriots down 26-14 with just over two minutes to play on Sunday against the Cleveland Browns, Brady led the team to two quick touchdowns (with a successful onside kick in between) to win the game, 27-26.
3) Yes, I pointed out Adrian Peterson’s negativity about this game above, but the end of this game was absolutely crazy and amazing. With a little over two minutes left in the game, Minnesota had a 12-7 lead. In the final 2:05, a total of FIVE touchdowns were scored by the two teams, including a 41-yard run, a 77-yard kickoff return, and a 79-yard pass reception. Three of the touchdowns were by Baltimore, with the last one coming with only four seconds remaining to to win the game, 29-26.
4) Matt Prater, the kicker for the Denver Broncos, broke the NFL record for the longest field goal in NFL history on Sunday, hitting a 64-yarded just before halftime of his team’s win over the Tennesee Titans.
Bad sports, good sports appears every Monday
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Bad Sports 4 – Even if there was no crime involved in the case of Jameis Winston, there is no excuse, no good reason for smiles and giggles during the press conference about it. Let us suppose the woman in question is completely lying about the incident. It is still a sad and serious circumstance and deserves better than what occured. Let’s have some class and dignity.
As for State fans rioting after beating “That school from down there”…I have some objectivity issues since I bleed Blue. The Michigan-Michigan State rivalry does not come close to the Michigan vs. “That school from down there”.