College basketball court stormings are great … exercises in stupidity

Nam Y. Huh/AP

“Who are you, the fun police?”

“What next, ‘Get off my lawn’?”

“OK, Boomer.”

These are just some of the dismissive things college students and other young sports fans are saying to old weenies like me who believe something has to be done about court stormings in college basketball before something truly regrettable and deeply stupid happens.

Make that before something else regrettable and stupid happens.

Many of you have seen replays of Duke star Kyle Filipowski injuring his knee in a collision with a fan at the end of an 83-79 loss at Wake Forest on Saturday. It was one of those unhappy occurrences that makes one wonder how such things don’t transpire more often. You’ve got huge athletes such as 7-footer Filipowski on the court. You’ve got an army of students charging forward like revolutionaries at Yorktown, only instead of bayonets they’re all holding smartphones aloft like imbeciles. It’s chaos. Damn right it’s dangerous.

But that didn’t stop hordes of young people on social media from blaming Filipowski and his team for how it went down. Filipowski didn’t get off the court fast enough, they said. Besides, they said, if Duke can’t handle a fun, celebratory tradition it knew would be coming if it lost, then it should’ve won the game. Easy, right?

Listen, young people are wonderful. Broad-minded, inspired, brilliant. They also pour Coke into their parents’ good bourbon, pop unprescribed Adderall like Tic-Tacs in order to study for routine exams and think it’s OK to brutally insult teenagers for having bad games. God bless ’em — they’re the future, don’t you know — but it’s fair to say they can be, at least on occasion, every bit as dumb as the pathetic lame-os who brought them into the world.

Here’s what actually happened with Filipowski, who, though he had to be helped to the locker room, seems to have escaped serious injury. He got his fingertips on a long inbounds pass that fell away as time expired. He was at least 30 feet from the Duke bench, with his back to it and his momentum carrying him further from it. Within three seconds of touching the ball, he had a swarm of fans already moving past him toward center court. A blink of an eye after that, a fan smashed into his leg. Watch the video again if you must, but those are facts.

The cocksure observations that he should have been safely off the court or avoided the kid who crashed into him are ludicrous. There were upward of 100 sprinting fans on the court when he got hit. How could he be expected to be able to single out any one of them?

And another thing: Wake was a 2½-point favorite in that game against the No. 10 Blue Devils. Are we really storming non-upsets now?

Yes, storming is celebratory and mostly in pure fun. But there’s also an element of nastiness to it. The fan who smacked into Filipowski appeared to be looking directly at him and turned his head and stared as he thought he was passing by the 20-year-old center. Was the fan talking smack, too?

“When are we going to ban court storming?” Duke coach Jon Scheyer asked. “How many times does a player have to get into something where they get punched or they get pushed or they get taunted right in their face? It’s a dangerous thing. …

“When I played, at least there was 10 seconds and then storm the court. Now, the buzzer doesn’t even go off and they’re running on the floor. And this has happened to us a bunch this year.”

Wake athletic director John Currie issued a statement saying he’s in “complete agreement” that more must be done about “court and field storming,” meaning football, too. But what?

Schools love court stormings because alumni donors love to see them. If a school can raise eight figures to extend a coach’s contract or six figures to keep an all-conference point guard around for another season, it ought to be able to beef up security at the biggest home games and devise and implement plans to protect visiting teams.

According to its coach, Matt Painter, Purdue hasn’t had a road loss the last three seasons that didn’t end in a court storming.

“I don’t know why institutions aren’t ready for it,” he said after a January loss at Nebraska. “Like, what did you think was going to happen if they won? Spread the word. Spread the word before somebody gets hurt. A student from Nebraska should be able to storm the court, right? Like, we’re cool. But just get ready for it if that’s what we’re going to do.”

It’s not uncommon for a storming to lead to a problem. Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark was blindsided at Ohio State in January by a fan who was staring up at her phone while running. Also last month, a shirtless Tulane dipstick with his hat on backward ran up behind a Memphis player and shoved him in the back. What would’ve happened had the Memphis player clocked him in the mouth? Not to mention that storming a win against Memphis is like dancing in the streets after unexpectedly finding an almost-empty jar of peanut butter in the pantry.

One of these days, something really bad is going to happen.

I once asked Kansas coach Bill Self about having been trapped against the scorer’s table by hundreds of wild Kansas State students after a loss in 2015. Self was scared half to death.

At Wisconsin in 1993, 70 fans were injured as students crushed and trampled one another trying to get to the field after a football upset of Michigan. Badgers players were yanking fellow students off piles of screaming humans. First responders found some students not breathing. No one died — which still amazes me — but it was terrifying. I was right there, a journalist fresh out of school myself, trying to help and report on the scene at the same time.

All these years later, must we keep choosing stupid? Because it’s really getting old.