Source: Grant Halverson / Getty
The attention of the college basketball world the last few days has centered on Winston-Salem and it is all for different reasons than it should have people. Following Wake Forest’s win over the Duke Blue Devils in Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Duke center Kyle Filipowski collided with a Wake Forest student, causing him to have been helped back to the locker room with what Filipowski said afterward was a knee injury.
The injury has some pushing for court storming to the be eliminated from the sports, including the head coach of the Blue Devils, Jon Scheyer. “I’m concerned about the well being of our guys. Flip sprains his ankle. When are we gonna ban courtstorming? How many times does a player have to get into something where they get punched or they get pushed or they get taunted right in their face? It’s a dangerous thing. You look around the country and Caitlin Clark, something happens, and now Flip, I don’t know what his status is going to be. When I played, at least it was 10 seconds off the court, you would storm the court. Now it’s the buzzer doesn’t even go off, and they’re running on the floor. This has happened to us a bunch this year. That needs to stop.”
ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas proposed what he thinks would be an immediate solution earlier today on First Take. “All you have to do is once they’re on the court, don’t let them off. Just say you’re all detained and give them all citations or arrest them if you want to, and then courtstormings will stop the next day. There’s no accountability for this. The fans feel like it’s an entitlement, and the universities like it. And the truth is, we like it.”
Earlier today on the Mac & Bone Show, his ESPN counterpart, Jon Crispin, said he doesn’t want to overreact to this incident. “Everybody relax. It seems like when something like this happens, we overreact because we like to have something to talk about. Right? We go right to it and I get that, but let’s just take a breath for a second and say to ourselves, do we really want to take that away? I don’t know. We’re already losing interest in the game. We really don’t want to take something like that away.”
Fellow Mac & Bone Show Monday guest Grace Grill agrees that banning court storming is too much. “I couldn’t believe that people were this passionate about wanting the court storming to be banned. I’m like, are you sports fans or not? This is a part of college athletics. You don’t see this in the pro game, and this is what makes college athletics so great, is that it’s that passionate.”
As you can see, the sides are on this debate, but there is no denying that this situation has the sport considering serious changes for the first time ever.
