Less than 10 years removed from his days as an NFL receiver, Jason Avant, all 6-feet, 210 pounds of him, remains in playing shape.
On Saturday, he needed it.
As Avant walked off Ohio State’s football field after his Michigan Wolverines pulled the stunning upset, he spotted something altogether peculiar: an Ohio State player toting around a blue flag brandished with the maze-colored block M that had been ripped from its pole.
“I said, ‘Who is this jerk with the flag?’” recalls Avant, the Michigan in-game sideline reporter. “I thought ‘They shouldn’t have the flag!’ So I grabbed the flag from him.”
Immediately, Ohio State players and staff members gathered around him, Avant said, pushing and shoving, even attempting to wrestle the flag back.
“I still train seven days a week,” he said during an interview Sunday, laughing. “I knew they weren’t knocking me over.”
Amid a host of college football rivalry clashes, the Michigan-Ohio State fracas kickstarted a day full of jawing coaches, postgame punches and flag-planting field assaults. Left hooks were landed. Helmets were thrown. Fans, coaches and players exchanged words, shoves and, yes, flags.
The act of planting a flag into an opponent’s home field turf, or at the very least waving such flag at midfield, triggered many of the melees.
In Columbus, following his team’s stunning upset of the No. 2 Buckeyes, Michigan edge rusher Derrick Moore emerged from a tunnel with the very Michigan flag that Avant eventually reclaimed. Moore marched through a sea of Michigan and Ohio State players and, eventually, had the flag ripped from his grasp by Ohio State senior Jack Sawyer.
Hours later in Clemson, a group of South Carolina players thrust the Carolina flag into the midfield Tiger paw logo after beating their rivals. In Chapel Hill, NC State stormed back for a win over North Carolina, eliciting from Wolfpack safety Cyrus Fagan a flag-planting of his own.
Finally, in Tallahassee, the Florida Gators capped their victory over Florida State with an enthusiastic planting of the flag from junior edge rusher George Gumbs Jr. — a move that sparked not just a fight but a heated on-field exchange between the teams’ head coaches.
All of the flag-planting madness has some college sports leaders suggesting that conferences should police such postgame incidents through uniform and agreed-upon policies. The four power leagues should “get together to vet these issues,” said Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark.
“We have to collectively come together,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said. “We can do things independently as conferences, but we need to all come together, and our approach must 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 Monday, other leagues have not announced disciplinary measures.
In previous years, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey advised his member schools to remove flags from the field late in the game to prevent such issues. On Saturday, he held conversations with administrators reinforcing that message — one that, perhaps, was heeded by University of Texas officials who, led by coach Steve Sarkisian, prevented Longhorns players from celebrating on the Texas A&M midfield logo in the SEC’s final game of the night.
“There shouldn’t be flag-planting. 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 you join the military or you fly to the moon.”
Flag-planting is a centuries-old custom with roots in military conquest of an opponent’s territory. It has seeped into the sports stratosphere, with road teams occasionally using the move to celebrate a victory on a rival’s field.
While this weekend’s flag-planting outburst rose to extreme levels, this has been happening for years in one of the country’s biggest rivalries: Oklahoma vs. Texas, a game annually held at the Cotton Bowl — a neutral site.
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After this year’s 34-3 win over the Sooners, Texas players carried out a more specific flag-planting routine at midfield. They stabbed the flag pole through a No. 6 Oklahoma jersey belonging to Baker Mayfield. While at OU, Mayfield gained notoriety for his post-game flag-planting, most famously planting a Sooners flag at midfield of Ohio Stadium after a 2017 win over the Buckeyes.
After leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to an overtime win over the Panthers on Sunday, Mayfield told reporters that he’s against any rule to ban the act.
“Let the boys play,” he said.
“I’ll say this: OU-Texas does it every time they play,” he said. “It’s not anything special. You take your ‘L’ and you move on. I’ll leave it at that.”
However, the flag-planting act sparked violence over the weekend.
At Ohio Stadium, law enforcement authorities even deployed pepper spray in an attempt to end the altercation. Ohio State Police released a statement announcing that one of its officers was injured and needed medical attention.
On-field videos of several incidents, from Chapel Hill to Clemson, showed players exchanging physical blows with other players as well as fans.
At the center of it all was… a flag.
Florida State coach Mike Norvell is seen on video tossing the Gators flag off FSU’s field. In North Carolina, UNC receiver Tylee Craft threw the planted NC State flag toward the stands. In Columbus, Sawyer ripped the Michigan flag off its pole and tossed it to the ground as a partial crowd roared in approval.
Oftentimes, this is about retribution. For instance, after Clemson’s win at South Carolina last season, Tigers players put an exclamation point on the victory with a flag-planting at Williams-Brice Stadium.
On Sunday, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney referred to the flag acts as a “bad look” and plans to speak with South Carolina coach Shane Beamer to ensure that it doesn’t happen in the future. Swinney found himself trapped amid fans and players of both teams who rushed onto the field Saturday in Clemson.
“I was dead in the middle of it and lucky to get out alive,” he said. “It was scary, and it was dangerous, and we’ve got to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore.”
Not everyone reacted in such a fashion.
In his news conference immediately following his team’s loss to Michigan, Ohio State coach Ryan Day suggested that his players were only defending their field. “These guys were looking to put a flag on our field and our guys weren’t going to let that happen,” he said. “This is our field.”
As it turns out, earlier this year, Michigan was the victim of a flag-planting incident from Texas players after the Longhorns beat the Wolverines 31-12 in September. Three months later, Sarkisian led an effort to prevent a replay in College Station. “I had just watched Ohio State and Michigan getting (into) a full-fledged 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 won’t do that going forward, and there’ll be consequences for all involved,” he said.
Of course, at times, it isn’t a flag at all.
After a win at Arizona on Saturday, Arizona State players shoved a pitchfork into the turf in Tucson. ASU defensive lineman Jacob Rich Kongaika, an Arizona transfer, planted the Sun Devils’ signature pitchfork into the Wildcats’ “A,” resulting in a brief altercation.
Flag or pitchfork, some believe that conferences themselves should take more action beyond financial penalties.
In a post on social media Sunday night, ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit, a former Ohio State quarterback who has two sons who have played for the Buckeyes, implored conference commissioners to suspend those players who escalated or contributed to the postgame fights.
“Sit those involved for their next game, whether it’s a bowl game or playoff game,” he wrote. “These dudes need consequences for their own good!”
Suspensions would come at the detriment of the leagues themselves — a conflict that Herbstreit notes in his post. The absence of players would impact a conference’s performance in games against rival leagues with potentially millions on the line. A conference will receive $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 advancing to the semifinal and national championship.
There exists no centralized governing body that can police such matters in an impartial and conflict-free way. It is a missing piece, many administrators believe, to an industry that is evolving from a regionalized amateur sport to a more national professionalized model.
But not everyone believes in policing flag-planting.
Count Avant as one of them.
“I thought it was classless on their part to start fighting,” he said. “Over the last five years or so in college football, it’s been a staple that the winning team plants flags. That’s a part of it. Ohio State kicked our butt for 15 years and they planted flags. We didn’t take exception to it. Texas did it on our field earlier this year. We didn’t take exception to it.”
After Avant wrestled the flag away from the Ohio State player, he marched up the Michigan tunnel and into the locker room — the flag, now somewhat infamous, secured in his possession.
“As the players came back to the locker room,” he said, “I was waving the flag for them and they were going crazy over it.”
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