An unserious idea.
In this season alone, we’ve seen two college basketball stars — Duke’s Kyle Filipowski and Iowa’s Caitlin Clark — either get hurt or narrowly avoid injury during a postgame court storming. And after Saturday’s scene when Wake Forest defeated No. 8 Duke at home, the topic of court storming was back under the microscope.
But yikes: Jay Bilas’ solution is not the answer at all.
While schools need to do a better job of either keeping students off the court or protecting players from both teams, they do not need to resort to placing thousands of students under arrest for celebrating a win. Bilas, though, suggested that it’s the only way to stop court storming once and for all in a Monday appearance on First Take.
ESPN's Jay Bilas on court storming: "If they wanted to stop it, they could stop it tomorrow… You don't have to stop the court storming. One time, all you have to do is once they're on the court, don't let them off. Just say, 'You're all detained' and give them all citations or… pic.twitter.com/Bdbb0SZTDy
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) February 26, 2024
Bilas said:
“Just say, ‘You’re all detained.’ And give them all citations or arrest them if you want to. And then court stormings will stop the next day.”
It was clear that Bilas didn’t give the dynamics of that idea much thought since it would take a massive police presence to pull that off and the prospect of having a criminal trespassing citation on your record isn’t exactly a selling point for student attendance. A school would never — nor should they ever — do that. Really, schools need to have a safety plan when it comes to a potential court storming, and Wake Forest clearly failed in that regard on Saturday.
Yet, Bilas’ idea was bad enough to have college basketball fans mocking him for it.
