Class, dismissed

You can't blame it on the full moon. I checked. There isn't another one for 16 days.

So maybe it's something in the water, like that mind-altering fluoride the John Birch Society used to warn us about all those years ago. Or it's yet another dangerous, fictitious side effect of those evil vaccines, speaking of the latest fit-'em-for-a-straitjacket lunacy.

Whatever. In any case, it was some weekend for college basketball fans behaving badly, and occasionally getting called out for it.

Matt Painter did the calling out at Purdue, telling his student section, the Paint Crew, that was it time to get classy and knock off the "IU sucks!" chant that's been a Mackey Arena staple forever. Just a day later, Maryland coach Mark Turgeon was compelled to get the Terrapins' PA announcer to tell the students to quit serenading Michigan freshman Ignas Brazdeikis with chants of "You're ugly!" as Brazdeikis stood on the free throw line.

And then there was Saturday night in Logan, Utah.

Where Utah State upset No. 12 Nevada, prompting the Utah State fans to rush the floor for some bizarre reason. Apparently at least one Utah State player taunted Nevada's Jordan Caroline with epithets, prompting Caroline to go ballistic in the hallway; apparently, also, Utah State fans blocked the entrance to the visiting locker room and (Nevada alleges) put hands on and shouted obscenities at Nevada's players as they tried to leave the floor.

This prompted an altercation in the hallway that involved Caroline, police officers assigned to crowd control (though not very effectively, obviously) and Nevada head coach Eric Musselman and his staff. All said and done, an ugly scene.

Now, again, I don't know if all this happening on one weekend was mere coincidence, or a reflection of the national zeitgeist at the moment. We're all angry about something these days, it seems. We're all into demonizing everyone we have the slightest disagreement with. And if we're not perpetually outraged, we're outraged that other people are outraged.

It is, as the late renegade journalist Hunter S. Thompson used to put it, bad craziness. And so maybe an attitude adjustment is in order, as Painter and Turgeon suggested.

Look. College basketball has always home to notorious viciousness from its fans; Duke's fan section, the Cameron Crazies, has practically been lionized for the inventiveness and the nastiness of its treatment of opposing players. When Lorenzo Charles of North Carolina State was arrested for stealing pizzas, the Cameron student section showered the court with pizza boxes when he was introduced. When Herman Veal of Maryland was arrested, but never charged, with sexually assaulting a fellow student, the Crazies greeted him with a hail of women's panties. On and on.

This has always been accepted as simply part of the adversity of going on the road in college buckets. The Crazies' antics are actually regarded as almost charming by the Duke-worshipping media.

Maybe that shouldn't be.

Maybe, as Painter said and Turgeon suggested, letting a little class back into the building wouldn't be a bad thing. This is not to say there's anything wrong with getting on the other team, particularly if you're inventive about it.

Not long ago at Purdue, for instance, a member of the Paint Crew held up a sign when IU was in town. On it was a picture of Purdue graduate Neil Armstrong saluting the American flag on the moon. The accompanying caption: "Our Banners Fly Higher Than Yours."

Which, of course, was the perfect rejoinder to IU constantly taunting Purdue by pointing to the Hoosiers' five national championship banners. And a great example of how to get an opponent's goat without, you know, saying one of them actually looks like a goat.

That, folks, is classless and demeans the idiots doing it far more than it demeans the targeted player. It takes no effort and no cleverness. And so when the Cameron Crazies singled out a player for abuse in the past, all it did was make you wonder just how low the admission standards must be at Duke.

Or rushing the floor because you beat, um, the 12th-ranked team in the country?

Yeah. No Rhodes scholars in that crowd, either.