Rutgers fans acted like idiots
Posted: Friday, September 14, 2007 7:49 AM
We spend a lot of time talking about how poorly behaved athletes are. But unless your name is Michael Vick, it’s hard to do anything more disgusting than what students at Rutgers the State Embarrassment of New Jersey did last week when Navy came to play football in Piscataway.
Rutgers invented intercollegiate football in 1869 and spent the next 137 years trying to figure out how to play it. Last year it finally found a lot of things that it hadn’t seen before: a great season, a top 10 national ranking, a bowl game win over a major opponent, ticket scalpers at Rutgers Stadium and celebrities in the crowd.
Apparently, it was too much for some of the student body to handle. Given a national stage for the first time ever, they used it to shower an overmatched Navy team with obscenities.
The Associated Press story on our site summarizes what happened and the apologies issued by Rutgers, but you owe it to yourself to read the column by Mark DiIonno in The Star-Ledger that made this a national story.
A blog called xavierthoughts reprints the column with the words he couldn’t use in a family newspaper along with the letters of apology from Rutgers. If you don’t mind coarse language, you can find it here.
The only issue I have with DiIonno’s column is that he feels the vicious language was worse because it was directed at players who will shortly be in harm’s way serving their country. But there are no degrees of offensiveness in this case. The language the Rutgers students used should not be directed against anyone, especially in a public setting, where it is sure to offend the sensibilities of the majority of those there.
Rutgers says it was a small number of students, but there were enough of them participating in the vile chants for the Navy players to have heard what they were saying. They were loud enough for people with young children to be outraged.
The apology, quite frankly, is too little too late. For the chant to be heard, it had to be coming from groups of students sitting together. So where were the security guards? Why didn’t anyone start throwing people out of the stadium, confiscating their student IDs, and making sure they never got into another Rutgers game again? Why didn’t the public address announcer not ask the idiots to stop bringing such shame and disgrace on themselves and their school?
People behave badly because we allow them to. It’s really that simple. Maybe you couldn’t throw them all out, but you could get some of them. Apparently, no one did anything, though. And if DiIonno hadn’t written his column, it may have gone unnoticed, only to be repeated at the next game.
Madison Square Garden once had a problem with foul-mouthed drunks masquerading as Rangers’ fans. Management finally decided enough was enough, beefed up security, and started lifting the tickets of the offenders. The Mets had a similar problem in the mid-1980s with their fans. They took the same approach that the Garden took and eliminated it.
Rutgers – and every other college whose fans take school spirit into four-letter territory – can do the same.
Meanwhile, someone needs to teach these jerks that their team has had exactly one good year. It’s a little early to act as if they own the world.
