US college students seem to love running into a moshpit after big sporting victories. What’s the deal with that? It’s a tale as old as time in American college sports: field storming (or court storming, in the case of basketball). It has been happening for decades: The home team wins a game against a highly touted opponent, usually as an underdog, and then thousands of undergraduates celebrate by rushing out of their seats and streaming into a mass of humanity on the playing surface.
Sounds fun. Everyone must love that, right? Not exactly. Lately, a litany of coaches, administrators, and media have called for an end to field-storming. Duke men’s basketball coach Jon Scheyer, ESPN’s top analyst Jay Bilas, and some of the most high-profile athletic executives in the country are pushing for the elimination of the practice, with various proposed solutions to get it out of college sports.
