COMMENTARY : NCAA Rules Will Need Teeth to Combat Brawls

For once there was no self-serving piousness. For once no clench-jawed football coach or sychophantic booster whined something silly, like media negativism was to blame for this past week’s lingering focus on the handfuls of college players who brawled in four different games last Saturday.

Surprisingly enough, nobody even appropriated the NHL’s old Cro-Magnon defense for goonery: that fights are nothing but “spontaneous combat brought on by the frustrations of the game.”

After a rash of brawls marred games between North Carolina-North Carolina State, Miami-Colorado, Maryland-Virginia Tech and Duke-Virginia last weekend, the outcry all week among people running college football was swifter than, say, the NFL’s response to Phoenix safety Chuck Cecil’s headhunting hits months after Cecil rode into the Pro Bowl playing the same way.

Brawling on the field always threatens to ignite the same in the stands. The Miami-Colorado fight lasted 11 frightening minutes.

The Maryland-Virginia Tech melee featured teams rushing from each sideline like Civil War platoons. Two assistant coaches -- Donnie Thompson of North Carolina and N.C. State’s Ted Cain -- have been suspended one game each for wrestling after their teams fought.

The four-fight card provoked precisely the right reaction from the NCAA, and most of the conferences and coaches involved.

But their follow-up will be the better yardstick.

The NCAA Presidents Commission issued a statement Monday calling for stronger enforcement of “proper competitive behavior” and urged the NCAA Rules Committee to study its existing rules. (What went unmentioned was that a proposal to suspend a player who crossed a football sideline to fight had been rejected in 1992 by two-thirds of the 700 college coaches surveyed.)

Noting that five of the eight teams involved were ACC schools, conference head Gene Corrigan promised a re-evaluation of ACC policy and conference coaches had tough talks with their teams.

The widespread sentiment was for a rule like the one college basketball already has: A player who fights is ejected from the game in progress, and the next game too. Currently, a college football player who fights receives only an ejection.

University of Miami Coach Dennis Erickson tried to take a leadership role on the fighting issue by announcing he’d established new guidelines at Miami that, Erickson magnanimously added, the NCAA is free to adopt.

This is astounding considering 1) Erickson suspended none of Miami’s seven players who were ejected Saturday, and 2) Miami’s old trash-talking, fatigue-wearing, showboating teams started the slide toward fighting and taunting in the first place. (Granted, the image was well-established by the time Erickson replaced Jimmy Johnson.)

Miami’s rush to the front of the peace movement would seem to smack of damage control, if not hypocrisy. But at least Erickson is saying the right thing. Miami football has a code of conduct, and it has teeth: one-game suspensions for first-time fighters; up to three games for repeat offenders.

The proposal won’t become the NCAA rule, however, unless three-fourths of the 12-member Rules Committee approves the plan. And that vote likely won’t happen until the off-season.

The irony is on football’s totem pole of violence, fighting is the least likely way that a heavily padded, helmet-wearing player could be hurt.

Intent is supposedly what makes brawling distinct from the sanctioned (and well-marketed) violence that goes on, without a whimper of protest, in every football game. But there aren’t more laments about that because the end point is obvious: It’s impossible to play big-time football without violence.