In a college bowl game there are a lot of story lines that can be followed.
Players give career performances, records are set, and any number of inspiring things will happen on the field worthy of legend for years to come. It is a spectacle that is uniquely American. Some players will be headed to fortune and glory in the National Football League, others are playing in their last football game, never to lace up cleats again.
In the 2014 Sugar Bowl, the University of Oklahoma defied the odds and predictions of every sports writer, broadcaster, book maker and ditch digger in the United States of America and defeated the University of Alabama 45-31 in one of the better bowl games in the BCS era. Of course, most of the people who will tell you that are indeed Sooners fans, but, regardless of who you support any underdog taking down the favored team is something that should dominate the headlines.
Not in the social media age, though, and certainly not in the case of the 2014 Sugar Bowl.
In the dying moments of the game, video was shot in the upper levels of the Louisiana Superdome of a woman, identified as a fan of the Crimson Tide, diving headlong across 3-4 rows of seats to attack a man who was identified as an OU fan. The scene was preceded by a lot of shouting back and forth between the two actors in the altercation, culminating in the scuffle.
It was a disgraceful display, but one that served to go "viral" within 24 hours of the end of the game thanks to the inevitable upload of the video to social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook.
Despite the utter senselessness of the act itself, not a lot is known about what led up to the fight other than the footage splayed all over the media. One news organization even went so far as to call the combatants and put them on a conference call. In doing so, the media decided to take the focus of a career day of a freshman quarterback...Trevor Knight of the Sooners, who threw for 348 yards and four touchdowns...and the Sooners defense cinching up and corralling the powerful Alabama offense and put it on a group of stupid people taking sports too seriously.
What bothers this writer is that it will expand what is already a huge problem in our society. People who have their hands on their video-equipped cell phones looking for things they can post on social media. It's one thing to take the soccer mom route, and it is quite another to sit in a crowd at a stadium and deliberately incite people to get stupid. That is next. All for the sake of getting more hits and more subscribers. Then someone will really get hurt, or worse, get killed.
Then where will we be?
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