ESPN NFL analyst Chris Canty added his voice to the debate around court-storming in college basketball in the aftermath of Duke’s loss to Wake Forest over the weekend.
While fans stormed the court at the LJVM Coliseum, Blue Devils star Kyle Filipowski suffered an ankle injury when a Wake Forest fan ran into him, renewing calls for the ban of on-court celebrations in the wake of upsets across the sport.
“Let’s also pretend like the players don’t have to have some more awareness in those moments as well,” Canty said Tuesday on ESPN’s Get Up. “What we saw from Kyle Filipowski, he looks like he’s going on a walk through the quad on campus, where you see that there are fans that are storming the court. He has to have more awareness of the situation and have urgency about getting the hell off the court.”
Although Canty believes Filipowski could have picked up the pace to exit the floor, he didn’t absolve the fans of blame.
“Now, I think that they have to do a better job of creating a plan and having that in place,” Canty said. “And I get that we don’t want to put the onus on the visiting team. But that has to happen.”
Get Up host Mike Greenberg was taken aback by Canty’s comments, but the former NFL star didn’t back down.
“As a player, you’ve got to have awareness. And I know we always talk about with in-game situations,” Canty added. “But you also have to have awareness of the environments that you’re in. And with that situation over the weekend, I don’t think Kyle Filipowski showed that level of awareness.”
Despite the controversy, court storming remains in the game for now, with the only ramification being fines administered to the home school.
That won’t be enough to keep rabid fans from celebrating a monumental upset on the hardwood, especially considering most of the fans in question are students.
However, it’s likely that something will be done to ensure that an incident like the one fans saw Saturday in Winston-Salem doesn’t happen again.
