Followup: According to today’s Columbus Dispatch (story should be on their website, which I believe requires registration), 7 of the 48 arrested for various crimes during the riot and associated festivities were current students. 6 others were alumni and 1 was a former student.
Seeing that there were probably many others involved in illegal activities who were not arrested, a reasonable conclusion is that a (substantial) minority of those behaving criminally were current or former O.S.U. students.
I’m not a big fan of video surveillance, but one option that should be considered to prevent this kind of thing in the future is a highly publicized videocam presence in the university district active on game nights (the police have already announced that they will be studying available videotape from Saturday night to see if any further arrests can be made).
I believe that the majority of those involved in the rioting were not students, but more important…they were not even sports fans.
I bet that most of the people burning and flipping cars could not tell you the score of the game.
I’ve read quite a few posts that suggest penalizing the team or the university. How would that help? If I’m correct, those responsible for the riots couldn’t care less about the Buckeyes. If we had lost, there still would have been riots. If the weather were bad and there was no game, there still would have been riots.
Penalize those responsible. The ones that swung the bat or lit the match.
True sports fans (from ANY team) cheer on their teams hard work and good fortune.
The title of this thread is “Asshat Ohio State fans”. I believe you should have titled it “Asshat rioters”. These are the people that you take offense with. I’m an Ohio State fan and do not condone the actions of those people.
Calling those people (or animals) fans is like saying that someone who has heard of the SDMB, read a couple threads and maybe even posted a message or 2 is a Doper.
Look at the pictures in BarBQSauce’s first link. I don’t see very much red in there. Students or not…these people aren’t fans. I wear my scarlett and grey with pride.
These stories and this thread make me want to thank God for giving me the sense to go to a school where no one gave a flying fig about any organized sport (with the possible exception of some intramural ones).
It reminds me of all the post-championship Bulls riots here in Chicago. I would watch them on TV and wonder why these people didn’t realize that they hadn’t won anything. Somehow I think they were under the impression that they got a share of the winnings.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I have been following the thread, and reading the relevant links. I checked the Yahoo photos, and sure enough, I saw a shot of people tearing up the turf.
Do they have to do that?! Yes, I know a mob is going to do what it’s going to do, but Jesuchristo, if I were a groundskeeper at OSU, I would be chewing glass.
Ohioans are not that accustomed to winning. When it happens, we tend to go a little overboard.
I remember when University of Dayton was in the Final Four. Wasn’t exactly a riot, but many sofas were burned in the street on THAT day. (I, personally, wouldn’t celebrate that way. But that’s me)
I saw similar behaviour when the Lakers won the Championships.
Lame??? This coming from a quadraplegic! State is the only ACC team that’ll play ECU more often than once in a millenium. Plus, that one-sided fairground stand you call a stadium in the swamplands is NEVER chosen as the place to play unless you’re up against a junior college team like Gardner-Webb. The only reason ECU fans never tear down their own goal posts is because it’s half the town’s budget!
Not so. We play Duke at least once a year. Granted, that’s the football team, so it’s not much of anything…
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Bah! They’re just scared a’ tha floodwaters! Feckin’ cowards all of 'em! If ECU can battle the mighty waters of Floyd the Destructor and come out on top, why can’t those wussy inland colleges? Sure, all of the west campus was flooded, but that didn’t stop us from building the new Science and Technology building right in the middle of a drained lakebed.
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But it was our own goalposts we tore down. Also it’s a bit unfair to say that the football team is half the town’s economy. At least a quarter of it comes from the roughly 9,784,658 bars downtown. When The Attic falls, so falls Greenville.
When The Attic falls, so falls Greenville.