Fines won't stop field storming, and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey knows it | Goodbread

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. − The guy who hangs from a goalpost until it breaks to celebrate his team's victory over an SEC football rival isn't writing a check to the Southeastern Conference for doing so. Neither are the thousands of fans who join him in a field-storming when the clock hits 0:00 and the home team has just pulled off a major upset.

They write checks to their school for the ticket, and the school, in turn, writes the check to the SEC to pay for their bad behavior. And that's the disconnect that makes the SEC's fine structure − $50,000 for a first offense, $100,000 for a second offense, and $250,000 thereafter − relatively ineffective in deterring home fans from the practice of rushing the field or court. Heck, there's even a disconnect at the school level, based on Tennessee President Randy Boyd's reaction when UT football fans stormed Neyland Stadium after snapping a 15-year losing streak to Alabama last October.

"It doesn't matter," Boyd said of the fine as thousands of UT fans flooded the field. "We'll do this every year."

That check UT wrote didn't come out of Boyd's salary, either.

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The SEC is working on a better solution after both of Alabama's football losses last fall, at UT and at LSU, resulted in field stormings. And SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey recognizes that fines alone can't stamp out the problem entirely.

"The fact that field-rushing still happens means that the fine structure hasn't solved all of our problems. I think it has reduced the field- or court-incursions," Sankey said Monday at The Associated Press Sports Editors southeast region meeting, held at the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. "Does just ramping up the fine resolve the issue? When you have a level of momentum around thousands and thousands of people, you have to be careful. And there is some history in crowd management that suggests you be careful. We've got an event security working group still looking at ideas. I've asked our staff to go back and look at even more ideas. I would expect some level of updates as we go into the year ahead, one of which is a higher expectation for security around the visiting team when those field incursions take place."

Pay close attention to the very end of that comment, because it informs what might be coming beyond fines. There's an obvious physical danger in a crowd of thousands congregating in a place where a goalpost can be snapped and fall like a tree. But beyond that, there's a risk of violence when reveling fans who loathe their rivals are able to rub it in by getting squarely in the face of athletes who've just lost an emotional game. The ticket buys fans a right to run their mouths from the stands, not a right to impede a player's path to the visiting locker room.

At the same time, players have to be held accountable for their actions even if fans can't be. Alabama wide receiver Jermaine Burton presumably learned that last year when he made contact with a female fan in the midst of the Neyland Stadium madness and was later disciplined, by some internal measure that wasn't made public, by Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban.

Sankey's remark about beefing up security around the visiting team is a key part of the issue for the league, and at the same time, it's a practical approach. No amount of on-field security can stop the will of 50,000 fans if that will is to take the field. But if the goal is instead shepherding visiting players, coaches and staff − call it 125 people, roughly − safely to the tunnel in the midst of a field-storming, that's ... well, that's still an extremely difficult task.

But extremely difficult is better than impossible. Surrounding a visiting team with a certain amount of protection is a lot easier than trying to secure the entire perimeter of a football field. What shape that protection might take remains to be seen. Sankey is clearly open to ideas, be they about protecting the visiting team or about keeping fans in the stands.

He didn't specify what those ideas are, but it's time to implement the best of them.

Fines, to be sure, aren't the answer.

Reach Chase Goodbread at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Fines won't stop field storming, and SEC commish Greg Sankey knows it