Less than 10 years removed from his days as an NFL receiver, Jason Avant, all 6-foot-4, remains in playing shape.
He needed it on Saturday.
As Avant left the Ohio State football field after his Michigan Wolverines pulled off the stunning upset, he saw something very strange: an Ohio State player waving a blue flag, waving the maze-colored block M that had been torn from the post.
“I said, ‘Who is this idiot with the flag?’” recalled Avant, the in-game sideline reporter from Michigan. “I thought, ‘They can’t have the flag!’ So I took the flag away from him.”
Immediately, Ohio State players and staff gathered around him, Avant said, pushing and shoving, even trying to wrestle the flag back.
“I still train seven days a week,” he said with a laugh during an interview on Sunday. “I knew they weren’t going to knock me over.”
Amid a slew of college football rivalries, the Michigan-Ohio State battle kicked off a day of overpowering coaches, post-game punches and on-field flag-planting attacks. Left hooks were landed. Helmets were thrown. Fans, coaches and players exchanged words, shoves and, yes, flags.
Planting a flag in an opponent’s home field, or at least waving such a flag at midfield, caused many of the melees.
In Columbus, after his team’s stunning upset of the No. 2 Buckeyes, Michigan edge rusher Derrick Moore emerged from a tunnel carrying the same Michigan flag that Avant eventually reclaimed. Moore marched through a sea of players from Michigan and Ohio State and eventually had the flag ripped from his hands by Ohio State senior Jack Sawyer.
Hours later at Clemson, a group of South Carolina players raised the Carolina flag in the Tiger Paw logo at midfield after defeating their rivals. In Chapel Hill, NC State stormed back for a win over North Carolina, leaving Wolfpack safety Cyrus Fagan to plant his own flag.
Finally, in Tallahassee, the Florida Gators capped their victory over Florida State with junior edge rusher George Gumbs Jr.’s enthusiastic flag planting. – a move that not only led to a fight, but also to a heated argument on the field between the heads of the teams coaches.
All this flag-planting frenzy has led some college sports leaders to suggest that conferences should control such postgame incidents through uniform and agreed-upon policies. The four power leagues should “come together to explore these issues,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said.
“We have to come together collectively,” said ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips. “We can do things independently like conferences, but we all have to come together and our approach has to be aggressive. This is unacceptable.”
On Sunday night, the Big Ten announced a $100,000 fine for both Michigan and Ohio State. As of 10 a.m. ET on Monday, no other leagues have announced any disciplinary actions.
In previous years, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey advised his member schools to remove flags from the field late in the game to avoid such problems. On Saturday, he held calls with administrators to reinforce that message — a message that may have been heeded by University of Texas officials who, under coach Steve Sarkisian, prevented Longhorns players from celebrating at the Texas A&M center field logo in the final game of the SEC. night.
“Flags are not allowed to be planted. Go win the game and go to the locker room,” Sankey told Yahoo Sports on Sunday. “If you want to plant a flag, you play capture the flag or join the army or fly to the moon.”
Flag planting is an age-old custom that has its roots in the military conquest of an opponent’s territory. It has penetrated the sport’s stratosphere, with road teams occasionally using this action to celebrate a victory on a rival’s field.
While the flag-planting outburst rose to extreme levels this weekend, it has been happening for years in one of the nation’s greatest rivalries: Oklahoma versus Texas, a game held annually at the Cotton Bowl – a neutral site.
After this year’s 34-3 win over the Sooners, the Texas players performed a more specific flag-planting routine at midfield. They ran the flagpole through a No. 6 Oklahoma jersey belonging to Baker Mayfield. While at OU, Mayfield gained fame for his post-game flag planting, most famously planting a Sooners flag at center field at Ohio Stadium after a win over the Buckeyes in 2017.
After leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a victory over the Panthers on Sunday, Mayfield told reporters he is against any rule banning the act.
“Let the boys play,” he said.
“I will say this: OU-Texas does it every time they play,” he said. “It’s nothing special. You take your ‘L’ and you move on. I’ll leave it at that.”
However, the flag-planting law led to violence this weekend.
At Ohio Stadium, law enforcement authorities even deployed pepper spray in an attempt to break up the altercation. The Ohio State Police released a statement announcing that one of its officers was injured and required medical attention.
On-field videos of several incidents, from Chapel Hill to Clemson, showed players exchanging physical blows with other players and fans.
At the center of it all was… a flag.
Florida State coach Mike Norvell is seen on video throwing the Gators flag off the FSU field. In North Carolina, UNC receiver Tylee Craft threw the planted NC State flag into the stands. In Columbus, Sawyer ripped the Michigan flag from the pole and threw it to the ground as a partial crowd roared in approval.
It often involves retaliation. For example, after Clemson’s win at South Carolina last season, Tigers players put an exclamation point on the victory by planting a flag at Williams-Brice Stadium.
On Sunday, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney called the flag a “bad look” and plans to speak with South Carolina coach Shane Beamer to ensure it doesn’t happen in the future. Swinney was caught between fans and players from both teams who stormed the field Saturday in Clemson.
“I was dead in the middle of it and was lucky to get out alive,” he said. “It was scary and dangerous, and we have to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Not everyone reacted this way.
At his press conference immediately after his team’s loss to Michigan, Ohio State coach Ryan Day suggested his players were only defending their court. “These guys wanted to put a flag on our field and our guys weren’t going to let that happen,” he said. “This is our field.”
It turns out that Michigan was the victim of a flag-planting incident by Texas players earlier this year after the Longhorns defeated the Wolverines 31-12 in September. Three months later, Sarkisian led an effort to prevent a repeat in College Station. “I had just watched Ohio State and Michigan get into a full-blown brawl in my hotel room, and I just didn’t think it was right,” he said afterward.
Florida coach Billy Napier described his team’s flag planting as “embarrassing to me” and apologized for the act. “We shouldn’t have done that. We will not do that again in the future, and that will have consequences for everyone involved,” he said.
Of course, sometimes it’s not a flag at all.
After a win in Arizona on Saturday, Arizona State players pushed a pitchfork into the turf in Tucson. ASU defensive lineman Jacob Rich Kongaika, a transfer from Arizona, planted the Sun Devils’ trademark pitchfork into the Wildcats’ ‘A’, resulting in a brief altercation.
Flag or pitchfork, some believe conferences themselves should take more action than financial sanctions.
In a social media post Sunday evening, ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit, a former Ohio State quarterback who has two sons who played for the Buckeyes, said: implored the conference commissioners to suspend the players who escalated or contributed to the postgame fights.
“Make sure those involved are present at their next game, whether it’s a bowl game or a playoff game,” he wrote. “These guys need consequences for their own good!”
Suspensions would come at the expense of the leagues themselves – a conflict Herbstreit notes in his post. The absence of players would affect a conference’s performance in games against rival leagues where millions may be at stake. A conference receives $4 million for each team that makes the CFP and each team that advances to the quarterfinals. That amount increases to $6 million for each team that advances to the semifinals and national championship.
There is no centralized governing body that can monitor such matters in an impartial and conflict-free manner. Many administrators believe it is a missing piece of an industry that is moving from a regional amateur sport to a more nationally professionalized model.
But not everyone believes in monitoring flag planting.
Count Avant as one of them.
“I thought it was classless on their part to start fighting,” he said. “For the past five years, it has been a staple in college football for the winning team to plant flags. That’s part of it. The state of Ohio has been targeting us and planting flags for fifteen years. We have made no exception. Texas did it on our field earlier this year. We have made no exception.”
After wrestling the flag away from the Ohio State player, Avant marched into the Michigan tunnel and into the locker room — the flag, now somewhat infamous, safely in his possession.
“When the players came back to the locker room,” he said, “I waved the flag for them and they went crazy about it.”
