Kansas Jayhawks: Bill Self and Jamari Traylor mobbed after K-State storms the court

By Daniel Tran | Feb 24, 2015

After the Kansas Jayhawks fell to Kansas State on Monday night, fans stormed the court, getting physical with Bill Self and Jamari Traylor.

Imagine you are a paper salesman (oh yes, this is a “The Office” homage), working incredibly hard to sell more reams of paper than a local competitor that you have been in butting heads with forever. You have beaten them many times over the years, but it does not make it any less sweet when you do it again.

Only this time, you’re trying to sell paper in their neighborhood and he finds a way to sell more than you. It’s a pretty devastating loss because you were hoping to be the top regional salesman and hoping to make a national statement to the corporate offices.

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As disappointing as the loss is, imagine a mob of 2,000+ friends of your rival salesman rushing towards you to get to the team who just outperformed you. Pretty easy to see that it would be a pretty terrifying scenario. But you do not have to tell that to the Kansas Jayhawks.

After Kansas fell to Kansas State at the Bramlage Coliseum in Manhattan, Kansas, the Jayhawks had to experience a similar situation when students of Kansas State stormed the court to celebrate a win against their rival and the No. 8 ranked school in the country. Some people celebrated the Sunflower Showdown victory a little harder than others.

Kansas Jayhawk head coach Bill Self was pinned by a mob of Kansas State fans against the scorer’s table en route to give a congratulatory handshake to Kansas State head coach Bruce Weber. This just seemed like a product of flood of students that just grew too quickly and Self fortunately seemed unscathed after the ordeal.

However, Jamari Traylor’s incident was anything but any accident. A student actually looked to slam into him as Traylor tried his best to leave the court after a discouraging loss.

As fun as it may be to be a part of something larger than you and celebrate a huge win against an in-state rival with your student body, there is a real danger that comes with storming the court. With such a massive group of people surrounding players that just suffered a big loss, it only takes one bad look or, in this case, one idiotic shove to make things turn ugly.

Fortunately, Traylor showed great restraint in not retaliating against a moron who for all he knew was trying to harm him, but even if he was not shoved by one man, he could have just as easy been trampled on and hurt. Just ask former Kentucky Wildcat Darius Miller, whom the Indiana bench stomped on after conceding the game-winning basket to Christian Watford in 2011.

I will be the first to admit that given the situation, I would have been the first guy out there on the court celebrating after a win of that magnitude, but that is only because I know I mean no harm to anyone on the court. Self was just a victim of volume, but Traylor was actually targeted with a purposeful shove that could’ve ended with escalating violence, or even worse.

Even the most oblivious athletic director has to realize the threat that storming the court really poses. There is the trample risk, and a chance that some student with malicious intent has some sort of weapon to dish out bodily harm to opposing players. If you think that that is not possible, than you are dense.

The scary thing is that a handful of security guards cannot stop thousands of students from rushing the court, but there are ways to stem to flow of people and allow the opposing team to exit the court safely before the fans take over completely. Until then, schools should think about banning the practice all together until the safety of players and coaches can be guaranteed.

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