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Student Fans Acting Badly

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

Grant Wahl at si.com decries this basketball season as the "ugliest in years" and calls on schools and conferences to take some action to get fans and fan speech under control. I have written enough about fan speech in this and other spaces that my views are pretty obvious. Jump over and read the piece to get a sense of the laundry list of incidents.

One problem is the way Wahl lumps too many dissimilar incidents together into an overall picture of bad fan behavior. Without question, threatening messages on the cell phones of players and families are out of line. So is throwing stuff at players' families--throwing stuff is not protected speech. Homophobic chants are troubling, if only for the continued (although constitutionally protected) disrespect is shows for a portion of the community. Of course, the fact that directing a homosexual epithet at an athlete is viewed by the speaker and the listener as a great insult raises some interesting sociological issues.

But I think Wahl undercuts his point by including too many examples that actually are pretty funny or clever and that certainly contain at least some level of social and political commentary. Calling attention to Maryland's low graduation rate, fans at Duke (which the mainstream media, including SI, lauds ad nauseum for their creativity) wore graduation caps and gowns and held signs reading "Fear the Classroom" and "A Mind is a Terrapin Thing to Waste." Even my wife, a Maryland fan when she pays attention, thought that was funny. Students at UNC waved "WANTED" posters with a picture of Duke's Gerald Henderson, a reference to Henderson's hard (and arguably flagrant?) foul on a UNC player last year. Fans at UAB targeted Memphis player Robert Dozier's allegedly hitting his girlfriend, with signs reading "We Beat Memphis, Not Our Girls." Some of this is offensive, sure--but offensiveness is not a ground for restricting speech.

Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo almost gets it: "I hate to say this because freedom of speech is at issue, but this isn't what freedom of speech is ­intended for." Actually, it is. But too often, we recoil when we see what freedom of speech looks (or sounds) like.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on February 27, 2008 (boomark / email).