Let Him Who Thinks He Stands

One thing I have noticed lately is that people’s wrath is unsparing and immediate, both in social media and in public events. The reaction of the crowd in Austin Saturday night to a bad, and potentially game-changing, penalty in the Georgia-Texas game was just the latest manifestation. Water bottles rained down from the stands amid demands for justice to be done, posthaste. Many Aggie fans blamed the culture down the road for this Roman Colosseum-esque response to officiating ineptitude. But if you have been an Aggie season ticket holder as long as I have, you have noticed the shift in culture at games when things go wrong. A&M used to have polite traditions for showing displeasure, such as hissing and (my personal favorite) the “horse’s laugh” yell. Anyone can tell you that the old tradition of hissing has given way to insistent booing at Aggie games, but the old school approach to contempt historically provided a cap on the anger of the moment. Deep-down desires for the death, or worse, of the unfortunate incompetent were sublimated in the silliness of the traditions. While hardly satisfying, there was some level of restraint built into the fact that you can only physically hiss so loud. (This is also one of the reasons the tradition has been put aside.) It was largely effective for restraining manifestations of anger.

But few are interested in doing that anymore. Outrage is meant to be expressed, and the sooner the better. This being election season, we are treated to the onslaught of political-action-committee-developed advertisements from both parties expressing outrage over their opponent’s position on a variety of issues, what they have or haven’t done, and why the earth will collapse upon itself if that person is elected. The anger would be palpable if we were still capable of hearing it. We must tune it out to survive.

But I admit that when I saw the bottles come raining down Saturday night in Austin, it shocked me. When they continued to be thrown after the initial reaction, it even caught the ABC announcers’ notice. The reversal of the original official’s call, while correct, also set a potentially dangerous precedent of rewarding the fans’ behavior.

It brought to mind an incident in the early 90’s when I was on the faculty at the University of Nebraska and Tom Osborne was Nebraska’s coach. After a touchdown in the second quarter that signaled it would be an easy day against Oklahoma, some oranges were thrown down on the track surrounding the field, celebrating the inevitable invitation to the Orange Bowl. Coach Osborne grabbed the referee’s microphone, looked up at the stands and said, “We’re Nebraska fans. We don’ t do that!” The behavior stopped immediately.

Texas coach Steve Sarkisian, to his credit, tried to do something similar by walking across the field signaling for fans to stop. While some on the Georgia side saw it as a delaying tactic to get the officials to reconsider the call, it seemed from my perspective intended to defuse the situation.

And, in all honesty, it needed defusing. Those responsible for the safety of the fans and players were clearly unprepared for the crowd’s reaction, and there was nothing at that point to keep things from escalating. And the sad truth is that one day it will. With more at stake financially, with more gambling interests involved, and with increasing fan detachment from players and coaches, knowing that they are truly, in many cases, “guns for hire,” I would not be at all surprised to see fans’ anger intensify further.

Many of my Aggie friends say, “That would never happen here.” I am guessing that many of them do not stop to think how much beer is sold in Kyle Field on a Saturday, or how much has been consumed by those attending a night game before they arrive. We are known to many other SEC fans as a friendly visit for a road game, and I think that is accurate. But if you are disappointed enough, and the stakes are high enough, nature is likely to take its course. Aggies are consuming the same social media and political diatribe that everyone else is. Nothing makes us exempt except conscious decisions to live by our values.

And the UT administration and board’s apology was stated around the school’s values, much the way we would express it here. But values are simply what really counts with you. And if what counts is winning, your actions are likely to follow your values, unless there are other stronger values that restrain those instincts.

Do money and wins drive us? Our deep desire for SEC legitimacy caused us to give a coach a ten-year contract, extend him to make sure he didn’t leave, and then fire him with $77 million left on his contract when he didn’t perform. So it is hard to make a case that we are immune from the behavior we saw in Austin Saturday night. The general culture we live in today is harsher and coarser, the relationships more short-term. I am not against players earning what they are worth. But the price is looser bonds of loyalty and shorter fuses when those players do not live up to their contracts.

Because, as with any other professional, that is all they are—employment contracts. Sometimes the price of being rich is being made a scapegoat when things go wrong, because the people in the seats paid a lot of money to see you succeed. You can build a culture that overrides that and treats players with respect however they perform. But while that may have happened naturally in the past with so many players playing simply for a scholarship or for nothing at all, it must be more intentional now.

Because we can always go lower. I fear the day when the water (or beer) bottles are raining down not because of officials’ performance, but because of that of the home team’s coaches and players. We all know that level of reaction is common in the privacy of homes and tailgates—that’s why Jerry Jones is threatening radio show hosts for criticizing his failures as owner of the Dallas Cowboys.

One of the early advantages of retirement was our chance last month to follow the footsteps of the apostle Paul across Greece, including to Corinth, where he spent eighteen months and understood the culture. In one of his letters he reminded the people there to “let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.”

We would be wise to take his advice and consider how it is we remain who we have always tried to be at Texas A&M. May we build a culture that is immune to the level of disrespect manifesting itself today. To do so will require some swimming upstream against the coarseness of the culture, and the willingness to restrain our darker instincts that used to reflect itself in the hiss or the horse’s laugh. But it will set us apart if we do it.

And if we are not intentional about doing it, we should not be surprised when the headline is about us.

Michael K. Shaub recently retired as Clinical Professor of Accounting in Texas A&M University’s James Benjamin Department of Accounting at Mays Business School.