Plant-Based Football.
It's all happening at midfield. Be there
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The whole midfield thing has become an issue in college football, but it’s not my issue. I’m old enough to remember visiting players who, after scoring a big road win, would circle the stadium, taunting the home fans with a “We’re No. 1” finger wag. Sometimes they got the wrong finger up there.
So I don’t have much more than a minute to care about flag planting, which is merely the most recent version of old, old, old-school disrespect between and among rivals. Planting your school’s flag on the home team’s logo after a big road win is neither novel nor particularly brainy. I mean, Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield did it at Ohio State waaay back in 2017, and even Mayfield later admitted it was little more than a last-minute afterthought of a decision.
It turned out that Mayfield wanted to do something, though. He was still upset about what had happened a year before, in 2016, when Ohio State pounded Oklahoma in Norman and then celebrated very loudly on the field. “It was embarrassing for them to sing their fight song on our field,” Mayfield said after his flag-planting deal. “They’re probably feeling the same way right now.”
So Mayfield had to take it when it was his turn, and then a year later, he got to dish it out. And so — whatever, right? That’s college sports, roughly the same as students rushing the field or court after a huge win that may or may not add up to much in the big picture of a team’s season.
The Oklahoma-Texas game annually involves the winning team planting a flag. It’s at a neutral site, but tensions still run sky-high. “OU-Texas does it every time they play,” Mayfield said on Sunday when asked about the wild college weekend. “It’s not anything special. You take your ‘L’ and you move on.”
This past weekend was worse in terms of the body count, only because it was rivalry week for a lot of schools and flag-planting is a fairly direct middle finger to ye olde opponent. So Michigan and Ohio State brawled over a flag, and so did Florida and Florida State, and South Carolina and Clemson, and North Carolina State and North Carolina.
Arizona and Arizona State went at it over the planting of a Sun Devil pitchfork…
…which is at least a cool little wrinkle. And the only reason Texas and Texas A&M didn’t brawl was that the Longhorns’ coach, who’d seen the melee in Columbus on TV earlier in the day, shooed his victorious players off the field at College Station before they did anything incendiary. (I’d give him credit, but he’s with Texas.)
It is interesting to see voices of concern suddenly raised over all of this. Granted, nobody is jumping up in favor of a scene like the one at Ohio State, which devolved to the point that police — it’s not yet clear which police — started using pepper spray on players, coaches and fans alike. Not cool.
On the other hand, university presidents and conference officials appear to be taking notice for the first time — ever? — that these rivalries get heated and that bleep-you celebrations get undertaken. That’s a little odd, considering that these schools and conferences have for decades profited wildly from rivalries getting as heated as they can get. But now that it’s time for public comment, whoa, nellie.
“We have to collectively come together,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips intoned. “We can do things independently as conferences, but we need to all come together, and our approach must be aggressive. This is unacceptable.”
I’ll give SEC commissioner Greg Sankey credit: In previous seasons, Sankey has advised the conference’s schools to remove their flags from the field late in games, in order to avoid exactly these sorts of issues. Sankey also had the quote of the weekend, telling Yahoo Sports, “There shouldn’t be flag-planting. Go win the game and go to the locker room. If you want to plant a flag, you play capture the flag or you join the military or you fly to the moon.”
The moon doesn’t sound too bad right now. Among other things, with weak cell service up there, I wouldn’t have to read a social media post like the one from ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit, asking conference officials to suspend all the players who escalated the on-field problems. (Uh huh.)
“These dudes need consequences for their own good!” wrote Herbstreit, who, as a guardian of what’s best for the game, has every reason to — oh, wait. He’s a former Ohio State quarterback with two sons who also played for the Buckeyes. Never mind.
The upshot of this is that conferences will probably, maybe, eventually do something about it. They could ban flags from the field entirely, which they won’t, or they could institute a system of escalating fines when such scenes do occur, which may or may not make any difference. (On Monday, Michigan and Ohio State were each fined $100,000 by the Big Ten, which is enough to pay for a couple of new flags.)
Can’t get excited about it. Among other things, if flag-planting is no longer allowed, some sneaky little mini-Mayfield will just come up with another display of utter disrespect for a rivalry opponent. It could be a message-leveraged T-shirt under his uniform that he reveals. It could be an awesome drone display that involves unsuitable language and imagery and can be controlled from his phone.
But it’ll happen. “College football is meant to have rivalries," said Baker Mayfield, who against all odds is lining up as the voice of reason here. “Just let the boys play.”
I could give a flag…🏴☠️