AS MICHIGAN FOOTBALL players took their Block M flag to midfield at Ohio Stadium after their 13-10 win against rival Ohio State on Nov. 30, they unwittingly set off a chain of events that still has the college football world talking.
Inside a celebratory mass of players, a small group stood at the center and waved the flag back and forth before symbolically planting it at the 50-yard line. It was the Wolverines’ fourth straight win against the Buckeyes, and again, they claimed the territory as their own.
None of this should have caught anyone off guard. When the Wolverines won at Ohio State in 2022, they celebrated the same way. Then-coach Jim Harbaugh thought so highly of it that he had the moment memorialized by displaying the flag itself prominently in the team museum at Schembechler Hall.
“I love it, love seeing that,” Michigan coach Sherrone Moore, then the offensive coordinator, said of the flag the following spring. “I think about that game every day, think about every moment. When you walk in the building, you see it as soon as you walk in. Obviously, you see all the things about the rivalry and what it is, and you think about that every day. It’s constantly on my mind.”
That year, the on-field response was tame. There were agitated Ohio State players, but nothing outside the norm of what often transpires in the immediate aftermath of any big rivalry game.
This year, that was not the case.
Michigan’s flag plant sparked a five-minute brawl that led to the use of pepper spray by police, left players and coaches from both sides bloodied and resulted in one police officer receiving medical attention.
It was the first of five similar postgame celebrations on college football’s rivalry Saturday, with South Carolina (at Clemson), NC State (at North Carolina), Florida (at Florida State) and Arizona State (at Arizona) all staking territory at midfield after road wins.
By the time Texas put the finishing touches on its victory at Texas A&M that night — the first game in a high-stakes, heated rivalry that had not been played since 2011 — Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian knew he had to prevent a similar scene at Kyle Field. Earlier in the season, Texas linebacker David Gbenda planted a Longhorns flag after winning at Michigan, but Sarkisian quickly made his way to midfield this time and ushered his players away.
I just watched Ohio State and Michigan get into a full-fledged brawl in my hotel room today, and I just didn’t think it was right,” Sarkisian said in the postgame news conference. “Rivalries are great, but there’s a way to win with class. And I just didn’t think that’s the right thing to do. We shouldn’t be on their logo.”
Ahead of the first home-hosted playoff games in college football this week, flag-planting conversations have raged on. Some coaches, and even pro athletes, are for it; others are against it. One state lawmaker went as far as to introduce a bill to make the act a felony.
It’s all, apparently, up for debate.
IN 2017, A Reddit user named Nathan Bingham created what he called the College Football Imperialism Map. Every county in the nation was assigned to whatever FBS program was closest to its geographic center. Then as games were played, the map was updated with the winner of each game acquiring whatever territory was possessed by the team it played.
It effectively turned the college football season into a modified version of the popular board game Risk, where fans got to see their team plant its proverbial flag (logo) in acquired territory across the country. It was an immediate hit. A lot of that can be attributed to how visually satisfying the map is — especially when it updates — but the exercise also tapped into the uniquely tribalistic nature of college football.
More so than in professional sports, where teams are made up of players from all over the country or world, college football programs have historically been a reflection of their region.
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Tempers flare as NC State attempts to plant flag following win over UNC
The end of NC State vs. North Carolina devolves into chaos as Wolfpack players take offense to a Tar Heels player throwing their flag onto the ground.
That has become less the case as recruiting has become more of a national game, but the general sentiment remains. That dynamic contributes to why rivalries are more prevalent in college: They extend to academics, other sports and beyond.
“In some ways [a rivalry] kind of morphs into an identity thing where part of being a member of one team is a desire to beat a specific team or have distaste for that team,” said Dr. Francesco Dandekar, the associate director for sports psychiatry at Stanford University. “In those situations when your identity is in play or at stake, people will also do things that maybe they wouldn’t normally do because it just feels like it’s more necessary.”
It helps explain why, perhaps, flag-planting celebrations have become more of an issue after rivalry games than lower-stakes games. For the Ohio State players, Michigan’s celebration was received as an affront to their collective identity.
“Probably what people are reacting to is the idea that, ‘We have conquered you,'” Dandekar said. “It can be taken as a very direct sign of disrespect to say, ‘OK, we’ve not only beaten you, we are going to somehow deface your field and somehow claim your stadium for our own.'”
It’s as if the Imperialism Map came to life.
From the outside, it’s easy to look at college football players celebrating a win by slamming a PVC pipe into artificial turf and conclude that it’s not that deep. And the idea that the act warrants a physical response can be dismissed out of hand.
But after a 3½-hour football game, Dandekar said, it becomes a lot harder to regulate your behavior.
“In the heat of the moment, all of us will function suboptimally if you subject us to strong enough emotion,” he said. “It’s been studied up and down. When we start to increase the magnitude of emotion that we’re feeling, it’s harder for our prefrontal cortex — which is the sort of higher-order decision-making part of our brain — to modulate that.
And in a sport like football, in which you are encouraged to be maximally aggressive within the stated rules — you are in a very sort of heightened state. … If someone does something that seems flagrantly disrespectful, your behavior is going to be more difficult to modulate.”
For the layman, all the evidence for what Dandekar explained was captured on video in the Ohio State postgame, most notably with Buckeyes defensive end Jack Sawyer being held back as he shouted, “They’re not f—ing planting the flag on our field again, bro.”
CELEBRATORY FLAG PLANTING is not new in college football.
It’s hard to pin down how long it has been going on, but cursory research found examples dating back at least 20 years.
After Michigan State upset Notre Dame 44-41 in overtime in 2005, two players — Eric Smith and Kaleb Thornhill — executed one of the more memorable celebrations.
“It was impulsive,” Thornhill told the Lansing State Journal in 2017. “That’s what’s special about the game of football. We were in the moment, and we slammed that flag in the middle of the field.”
A few weeks later, Minnesota did it after a win against Michigan, and an attempt by Georgia was thwarted by police officers after the Bulldogs’ win at Tennessee.
In response, then-Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany sent a conference-wide memo that said flag-planting celebrations had to stop, which was followed by a similar message in the SEC that outlined how flag planting was a violation of the conference’s sportsmanship policy.
It wasn’t until 2017 that another such celebration captured national consciousness. That’s when college football’s patron saint of flag planting, eventual Heisman Trophy winner Baker Mayfield, made his way to the Block O at Ohio Stadium and planted an Oklahoma flag following the No. 5 Sooners’ 31-16 win against No. 2 Ohio State.
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Mayfield plants Oklahoma flag at Ohio State midfield
After circling The Horseshoe with the Oklahoma flag, quarterback Baker Mayfield runs to midfield and stabs the Ohio State logo surrounded by teammates.
At the time, it was met with major backlash, and it resulted in Mayfield issuing an apology two days later.
“I didn’t mean for it to be disrespectful to any Ohio State people at all, especially the team or the players, because they’re a great team and a great program,” Mayfield said at the time. “It was an emotional game. I knew that it was going to have a lot of implications on the playoffs. … I got caught up in an emotional win. Yeah, it should’ve been something I did in the locker room. So I apologize for doing it in the middle of the field.”
The incident followed Mayfield to the NFL, and in 2019, former Ohio State star Nick Bosa exacted revenge during a “Monday Night Football” game, when he sacked Mayfield — then playing for the Cleveland Browns — and celebrated with a wave and plant of an imaginary flag.
“I think everybody knows what that was for,” Bosa said after the game. “I just wanted to get payback. He had it coming.”
After the recent wave of flag planting and having already addressed Texas planting a flag over his Oklahoma jersey after the Longhorns beat the Sooners in the Red River Rivalry in October this year, Mayfield was asked again for his thoughts on this brand of celebration.
”College football is meant to have rivalries,” Mayfield said. “That’s like the Big 12 banning the ‘horns down’ signal. Just let the boys play.”
FOR MID-AMERICAN CONFERENCE commissioner Jon Steinbrecher, the flag-planting debate is part of a larger conversation about sportsmanship in college sports.
After seeing the postgame fights in football and behavior on the sidelines by college basketball coaches, he felt compelled to write a letter to NCAA president Charlie Baker and the NCAA Division I board of directors on Dec. 5 with the subject line: Sportsmanship (or the absence thereof).
“The term poor sportsmanship does not capture the lack of decorum exhibited by coaches, student-athletes, and fans,” he wrote. “A portion of the behavior, in a non-sports context, could be considered criminal.”
In an interview with ESPN after he sent the letter, Steinbrecher reaffirmed those beliefs, expressing frustration about the state of play in college sports.
“I think it’s very much a reflection of what we see in society today that people, on all sorts of levels, seem to ignore norms or traditions,” he said. “In many circumstances, I think people are much more in your face. I think it has to do with the heightened scrutiny and pressure that people feel. We have, for some time now, athletes at all levels doing more and more things to draw attention to themselves.”
Part of that trend is how incentives have changed. In the name, image and likeness era, personal branding has a significant impact on athletes’ ability to make money. There is no financial value in blending in.
“In my mind, this isn’t about enacting a bunch of rules,” Steinbrecher said. “It’s about saying this is what the standard is, and we’re going to live to that standard, and we’re going to hold ourselves accountable to that standard. And when we don’t live up to that, we’ll address it.”
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Norvell initially snubs Napier’s handshake as FSU-Florida get into it
FSU coach Mike Norvell initially avoids shaking Florida coach Billy Napier’s hand after the Gators plant their flag in the middle of the Seminoles’ logo at the game’s conclusion.
Steinbrecher admits, however, that finding an effective way to discipline college athletes isn’t so straightforward.
“In the NFL, they have a financial system [where teams and leagues can fine a player],” he said. “Probably at the collegiate level we have a participation system, right? What’s everybody want? Playing time.”
But those punishments function much differently. A fine in pro sports hurts only that individual. When a player is sidelined, the team feels it.
It goes further than that. Many college football coaches have financial bonuses for games won each season, which gives them personal financial incentives not to suspend star players. Some athletic directors also have similar win bonuses.
Are they expected to punish themselves?
One extreme solution arrived in the form of political grandstanding last week, when Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams introduced a bill, the O.H.I.O. Sportsmanship Act, that would classify flag planting at Ohio Stadium on football gamedays as a fifth-degree felony.
“After it happened at five separate games during Rivalry Week, and seeing that there was no immediate movement, I thought it was necessary to send a signal to our institutions of higher learning that they need to come up with policies to prevent this in the future so it doesn’t risk harm to our law enforcement officers or student-athletes or fans,” Williams told ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg.
NCAA president Charlie Baker told ESPN’s Dan Murphy flag planting is an issue the NCAA plans to address.
“I think the conferences are pretty serious, and so are the schools about taking a look at how they might create a more aggressive approach to dealing with that,” Baker said.
Whether that’s lip service to weather the moment or leads to meaningful change remains to be seen.
The melee following the Michigan-Ohio State game cost both teams a $100,000 fine from the Big Ten, a figure former Alabama coach Nick Saban made light of on ESPN’s “College GameDay.”
“I think to fine these schools $100K is worrying about mouse manure when you’re up to your ears in elephant s—,” Saban said.
OHIO STATE WILL host Tennessee on Saturday and is one of four teams, along with Texas, Penn State and Notre Dame, that will play at home this week as the College Football Playoff arrives on campuses for the first time.
After the Buckeyes were conquered at home by Michigan, it’s fair to question whether there will be lingering frustration from the events that marred the finish. Winning should be incentive enough, but the thought of losing at home, again, could also be a powerful motivator.
Especially since it would still be legal in the state of Ohio for Tennessee to celebrate the way Michigan did.
Most of the coaches whose teams were involved in the rivalry-week flag-planting games voiced their opposition to the act itself (and the retaliations) in the immediate aftermath, so the possibility of repeat performances seems unlikely.
Florida coach Billy Napier apologized “on behalf of the entire organization” for how his team represented the university.
Clemson coach Dabo Swinney called the incidents “a bad look for college football.”
Ohio State coach Ryan Day and Michigan’s Moore, however, mostly shrugged off what happened at The Horseshoe as the byproduct of an emotional game.
And if there was any doubt about Moore’s feelings on the matter, he made them clear at a basketball game against Iowa on Dec. 7. When he appeared on the jumbotron in the arena, Moore fired up the crowd by pretending to plant a flag.
Sherrone Moore hypes up the faithful Michigan crowd and emphatically plants an imaginary flag.
The crowd liked it, to say the least. pic.twitter.com/xbakn2pxsn
— Brock Heilig (@brockheilig) December 7, 2024
It was after an NBA game last week when perhaps the best solution for the whole issue was delivered after Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young celebrated a win in a similar fashion. As Young dribbled out the clock against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, he mock-rolled dice on the Knicks’ logo.
While some fans were outraged, Knicks star Jalen Brunson had a different response: “We should win the game if we don’t want him to do that.”
