Break Stuff (1980s)

Why are college football fans throwing things?

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I.

In the 1980s, a group of college students began hurling tortillas onto a college football field in Lubbock, Texas. It is one of those curious and (literally) organic phenomenons whose origins are entirely unclear: The most plausible explanation is that the students at Texas Tech University used to hurl aerodynamic soda lids onto the field, but at some point the school’s administration wised up and stopped selling them, and then the students began smuggling stacks of tortillas into the stadium and hurling them like delectable frisbees.

For the most part, throwing tortillas is funny and stupid and largely harmless, a way for young people to engage in mischief without actually doing any real damage. I wrote a few months ago about the students in my hometown who began hurling marshmallows onto the field at around the same time Texas Tech began using discs of fried flour (or masa, I suppose, depending upon one’s personal preference) as projecticles. It’s not ideal behavior, but as long as there’s no actual harm done, one might argue, then who really cares.

Storming the Court (1990s)

But on Saturday night, the whole thing spiraled out of control. The fans at Texas Tech, during a loss to Colorado, began hurling tortillas onto the field, along with water bottles and garbage and whatever else they could get their hands on, so much so that it wound up disrupting the game. And they did this for a very simple reason: Because they felt that the referees were somehow purposefully biased against their side.

This has become a trend in college football over the past several weeks, ever since Texas students protested a penalty call against Georgia by hurling water bottles onto the field, pausing the game and allowing officials to review the play overturn the penalty, which is something that most of us even know was permitted under the rules of the sport. And now fans, and particularly college students, seem to be continually replicating that display, in an attempt to prove that they can somehow alter what feels to them like a rigged system.

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II.

That last sentence sounds completely crazy, but this is where we are as a society. As I was writing this, I read this Mike Pesca column in The Atlantic, which criticizes Democrats for being “the HR department of political parties,” and scolds them, among other things, for being the party that’s actually interested in following the rules. I can understand the complaints about certain other potentially overzealous Democratic policies, but I guess following rules and norms is apparently considered a bad thing, too, because it didn’t win them an election.

It’s obvious by now that the sheer presence of the president-elect has corrupted our society—on both sides of the political spectrum—to the point where people don’t want to follow rules, because they believe the rules are somehow fixed against them. As usual, the author Michael Lewis saw this coming years ago, but now it’s here, and it’s manifesting itself on college football fields across America, with furious students engaging in puerile acts of disobedience that are eventually going to get someone seriously hurt. (But for me to say that, I guess, is too “HR department” for certain people’s tastes.)

Even in this case, there are people who are so convinced of their certitude that they are willing to defend this unruly behavior. Check out the comments section of this post on a University of Texas fan site, about the university’s president chiding the students who hurled debris onto the field against Georgia. There is a literally a dude in that comments section who launches into a jeremiad about how THE STUDENTS ARE THE ACTUAL VICTIMS HERE, because a bunch of middle-aged men have clearly rigged college football’s entire system to the point where students could only find a voice in this scenario by hurling projectiles onto a football field. And to condemn the students for this display, the commenter writes, is simply another act of “virtue signaling.” And he thinks that we’re insane for not being able to see that the entire system is rigged, and that this act of violence was ultimately justified.

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III.

I am concerned about many things that will happen over the next four years, but perhaps this is my biggest concern: That the ethics of a generation of youth will become even more twisted than they already are, and that conspiratorial thinking will vault further into the mainstream, and that people on all sides of the political spectrum will resort to some form of violence in order to vent their frustrations. (If the president-elect can get away with inciting a violent mob to storm the Capitol and still get re-elected, what does any of it even mean?)

People throwing things at sporting events is nothing new, but in the case of those tortillas at Texas Tech and those marshmallows at Penn State, it used to be act of youthful joy. It feels like something else now; it feels like an act of pure vitriol and anger at the circumstances these students have grown up under. And in a way, I get it, because COVID sucked for all of us, and because a generation of elders has truly and completely screwed over a generation of youth to the point that I’m not sure how habitable the planet will be by the time they reach my age.

But rules and norms exist for a reason, and it’s up to us, the rational adults who haven’t given ourselves over to a cult, to continue to enforce them, even when it feels like a scolding. Because if we don’t do it, and if we don’t hold the line here, then there is no game to be played at all anymore. There is just anarchy.

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