Less than 10 years removed from his days as an NFL wide receiver, Jason Avant, all 6-foot, 210 pounds, remains in playing shape.
Saturday, he needed it.
As Avant was leaving the Ohio State football field after his Michigan Wolverines pulled off the upset, he spotted something altogether strange: an Ohio State player holding a blue flag aloft with the maze-colored Block M that had been torn from its flagpole.
Advertisement
“I asked, ‘Who is that idiot with the flag?’ “, remembers Avant, the Michigan journalist. “I thought, ‘They shouldn’t have the flag!’ So I took the flag from him.
Immediately, Ohio State players and staff members gathered around him, Avant said, pushing and shoving him, even attempting to retrieve the flag.
“I still train seven days a week,” he said with a laugh in an interview Sunday. “I knew they weren’t knocking me over.”
Amid a multitude of rivalry matchups in college football, the fight between Michigan and Ohio State launched a day full of jaw-dropping coaching, post-match fisticuffs and on-field assaults to plant flags. Left hooks were landed. Helmets were released. Fans, coaches and players exchanged words, shoved each other and, of course, flags.
Advertisement
Planting a flag on an opponent’s field, or at the very least waving such a flag in the middle of the field, has sparked many a melee.
In Columbus, following his team superb surprise of the Buckeyes n°2Michigan edge rusher Derrick Moore emerged from a tunnel with the Michigan flag that Avant eventually retrieved. Moore walked through a sea of Michigan and Ohio State players and, ultimately, had the flag snatched from him by Ohio State senior Jack Sawyer.
Michigan Wolverines defensive back Rod Moore (9) waves a Michigan flag at midfield after the game against the Ohio State Buckeyes on November 30. (Ian Johnson/Getty Images)
(Sportswire Icon via Getty Images)
Hours later at Clemson, a group of South Carolina players drove the Carolina flag into the midfield tiger paw logo after beating their rivals. In Chapel Hill, NC State came roaring back for a win over North Carolina, prompting Wolfpack safety Cyrus Fagan to plant his own flag.
Advertisement
Finally, in Tallahassee, the Florida Gators capped their victory over Florida State with an enthusiastic flag planting of junior edge rusher George Gumbs Jr. — a move that sparked not only a brawl but a heated on-field exchange between the teams’ head coaches.
All this flag-planting madness is leading some college sports leaders to suggest that conferences should control such postgame incidents through uniform, agreed-upon policies. The four power leagues should “come together to look at these issues,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said.
“We need to come together collectively,” said ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips. “We can do things independently as conferences, but we all have to come together and our approach has to be aggressive. This is unacceptable.”
Sunday evening, the Big Ten announced a $100,000 fine for Michigan and Ohio State.. As of 10 a.m. ET Monday, other leagues had not announced disciplinary measures.
Advertisement
In previous years, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey advised his member schools to remove flags from the field at the end of games to avoid such problems. On Saturday, he had conversations with administrators reinforcing that message — a message that may have been heeded by University of Texas officials who, led by coach Steve Sarkisian, stopped Longhorns players from celebrating over the Texas A&M midfield logo during the SEC’s final game of the night.
“There shouldn’t be a flag planted. Go win the game and go to the locker room,” Sankey told Yahoo Sports on Sunday. “If you want to plant a flag, you play “capture the flag,” or you join the army, or you fly to the moon.”
Planting flags is a centuries-old custom that has its roots in the military conquest of an adversary’s territory. It has infiltrated the sporting stratosphere, with road teams sometimes using the move to celebrate a victory on a rival’s home field.
While this weekend’s flag-blowing reached extreme levels, it has been happening for years in one of the nation’s biggest rivalries: Oklahoma vs. Texas, a game held annually at the Cotton Bowl — a neutral site.
Advertisement
After this year’s 34-3 win over the Sooners, Texas players performed a more specific flag-planting routine at midfield. They stabbed the flagpole through a No. 6 Oklahoma jersey belonging to Baker Mayfield. At OU, Mayfield gained notoriety for his postgame flag, including planting a Sooners flag at midfield at Ohio Stadium after a 2017 win over the Buckeyes.
After leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to an overtime victory over the Panthers on Sunday, Mayfield told reporters he was against any rules prohibiting the act.
“Let the boys play,” he said.
“I will say this: OU-Texas does it every time they play,” he said. “It’s nothing special. You take your ‘L’ and move on. I’ll leave it at that.”
Advertisement
However, the act of planting the flag sparked violence over the weekend.
At Ohio Stadium, law enforcement even deployed pepper spray to try to end the altercation. The Ohio State Police released a statement announcing that one of their officers was injured and required medical attention.
On-field videos from several incidents, from Chapel Hill to Clemson, showed players exchanging physical blows with other players as well as fans.
At the center of it all was…a flag.
Florida State coach Mike Norvell is seen on video throwing the Gators flag onto FSU’s field. In North Carolina, a UNC player threw the North Carolina state flag toward the stands. In Columbus, Sawyer tore the Michigan flag from its flagpole and threw it to the ground as a partial crowd roared in approval.
Advertisement
It is often a matter of retaliation. For example, after Clemson’s victory at South Carolina last season, Tigers players put an exclamation point on the victory by planting a flag at Williams-Brice Stadium.
On Sunday, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney called the flag acts a “bad look” and plans to speak with South Carolina coach Shane Beamer to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future. Swinney found himself stuck among fans and players from both teams who rushed the field Saturday at Clemson.
“I was dead in the middle of it all and I was lucky to come out alive,” he said. “It was scary and dangerous, and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Not everyone reacted this way.
Advertisement
In his press conference immediately after his team’s loss to Michigan, Ohio State coach Ryan Day suggested his players were just defending their home court. “These guys were looking to put a flag on our field and our guys were not going to let that happen,” he said. “This is our domain.”
It turns out that earlier this year, Michigan was the victim of a flag-planting incident by Texas players after the Longhorns beat the Wolverines 31-12 in September. Three months later, Sargsyan led an effort to prevent a replay in College Station. “I had just seen Ohio State and Michigan get into a real fight in my hotel room, and I just didn’t think it was fair,” he said afterward.
Florida coach Billy Napier described his team’s planting of the flag as “embarrassing to me” and apologized for the act. “We should not have done this. We will not do this in the future, and there will be consequences for everyone involved,” he said.
Advertisement
Of course, sometimes it’s not a flag at all.
After a victory in Arizona on Saturday, Arizona State players stuck a pitchfork into the Tucson turf. ASU defensive lineman Jacob Rich Kongaika, a transfer from Arizona, planted the Sun Devils’ iconic pitchfork into the Wildcats’ “A,” leading to a brief altercation.
Flag or pitchfork, some believe the conferences themselves should take more action beyond financial sanctions.
In a social media post Sunday night, ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit, a former Ohio State quarterback who has two sons who played for the Buckeyes, implored conference commissioners to suspend players who escalated or contributed to postgame fighting.
Advertisement
“Seat those involved for their next game, whether it’s a bowl game or a playoff game,” he wrote. “These guys need consequences for their own good!” »
The suspensions would come at the expense of the leagues themselves – a conflict Herbstreit notes in his post. The absence of players would impact a conference’s performance in games against rival leagues with potentially millions on the line. A conference will receive $4 million for each team that reaches the CFP and each team that advances to the quarterfinals. This amount increases to $6 million for each team qualifying for the semifinals and the national championship.
There is no centralized governing body capable of controlling these matters in an impartial and conflict-free manner. In the view of many administrators, this is a missing piece in an industry that is evolving from a regionalized amateur sport to a more national, professionalized model.
But not everyone believes in the police presence of flags.
Advertisement
Count Avant as one of them.
“I thought it was classless of them to start fighting,” he said. “For the last five years or so in college football, it was common for the winning team to plant flags. That’s part of it. Ohio State kicked our butts for 15 years and they planted flags. We didn’t object to it. Texas did it on our field earlier this year. We didn’t object to it.”
After Avant took the flag away from the Ohio State player, he walked up the Michigan tunnel and into the locker room – the flag, now somewhat infamous, was in his possession.
“As the players were coming back to the locker room,” he said, “I was waving the flag for them and they were going crazy for it.”
