What? Am I wrong that most agree (virtually everyone) that security should have done a better job delaying the court rush to allow Duke a bit more time to get off the court? Is anyone arguing against "the students were on the court too fast"? I think we are taking issue with Flip Flop playing the victim when he was the only player who didn't make an effort to get off the court quickly and he then initiated contact with the student. I think you give the players some leeway here but they are also still responsible for their own actions, even if things happened as they did. He took out his frustration on a student and injured himself in the process. Everyone knew the court would be stormed. It should not have been stormed without more delay and he ALSO should have done a better job getting off and avoiding the students.
Security needed to do better and Flip Flop needed to do better. If he uses even a modicum of urgency to get off the court and has even minimal awareness of his surroundings with associated minimal effort to avoid collision, none of the outrage happens. Hopefully, our folks still recognize the lapse in letting a few students on too early and quietly make adjustment, reinforce that plan.
This times 1,000,000. Nobody involved went in with malicious intent to hurt anyone, they were trying to get past him. I’ll even give him the benefit of the doubt of saying his ‘motions’ were a reflexive reaction to protect himself, and contact happened leading to an unfortunate injury. Like so many replays, sometimes they are inconclusive and/or biased by our perspective.
Were students on the floor too soon? Yes. Could he have been more aware and done more to protect himself? Yes (as evidenced by Proctor being closer to baseline and further from bench but hauling ass to get out of the way).
Everyone can and will learn from this. It’s the ‘victim/villain’ part that blows my mind. Words matter. Nobody was going ‘at him’ or ‘after him’.
Bilas’s ‘rope ‘em all in and arrest them all!’ take is ludicrous, as is saying we shouldn’t storm the court because we were favored.
Yes the court is the ‘players space’, but our players are players too. It’s their space too. They play hard to win, knowing one part of that celebration and reward for hard work and victory in a HUGE game is their fans storming their court! I’m always a bit nervous one of our players gets hurt too, but it’s part of what makes college hoops and March Madness what it is. Just storm the court like you’ve done it before. Party with your peeps, and leave the opposing team alone.
How do we fix it? I am totally against staging this whole thing…setting the shot clock, etc. For the Joel, seems like roping off from the bench to the basket on each end should push students around and away enough to give players plenty of open court to get to the sideline without issue. Just make it standard practice for all games at the last under 4:00 time out. Beef up security for bigger games.
And absolutely, stay behind the barriers and off the court until the game is actually over, or face consequences.
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