UPDATE: This post was originally published on January 14. Tonight, February 20th, unranked UNC beat Duke at home and the students rushed the court. People made the same arguments about UNC’s history and how the kids should know better than to rush the court. If it helps, substitute “UNC” for “Indiana” and the rest of this article stands.

On Tuesday night the unranked Indiana Hoosiers beat the #3 Wisconsin Badgers 75-72 in an exciting game that came down to the last possession. After IU locked up the win, many of the younger fans in attendance at Assembly Hall stormed the court, hugging their classmates and cheering and generally acting like happy college kids.

For some NCAA basketball fans and pundits, this was a Bad Move.

It was a Bad Move because rushing the court, presumably, should be saved for big occasions. And when a school with the basketball history of Indiana rushes the court for a mid-season win, it shows a proper lack of respect both for the game and to the school’s history of big wins. By rushing the court during any old win, the argument goes, it demeans the truly big, important wins.

This is dumb.

It’s dumb for a lot of reasons, a few of which are here:

It’s not up to sportswriters and fans on their couch to decide what a “big, important win” is.

Listen, if you want to make the argument that fans should never rush a court because it’s dangerous, that’s fine. I don’t personally agree, but it’s an argument one could make.

This is directed at the couch potatoes/writers who believe that the Indiana fans in attendance should not have rushed the court for a game that wasn’t big/important enough.

Well, who gets to make that call? Do we need an old man in a room somewhere who gives a Joaquin-Phoenix-in-Gladiator-style thumbs up or down before we allow the kids to run out on the court and hug their classmates?



Who gets to draw the line? And if your answer is “You’ll know it when you see it…” well, that answer isn’t good enough.

College kids don’t care about history, nor should they.

This was the fallback argument that a lot of writers/grumps made when pushed about why it was unbecoming of the IU kids to storm the court. It was best summed up here:

Ok Indiana University should not storm the court. Rare that schools with their tradition storms. — Seth Greenberg (@SethOnHoops) January 15, 2014

This would be all well and fine, except here’s the thing, a lot of the kids in attendance at the game tonight were born in 1995. Very few of them have any working knowledge of the history of Indiana basketball, and for those who have done the research and learned about it, they STILL shouldn’t be held up to some ideals set about by Bob Knight and whoever else before they were born.

These are kids. Some are 18. The oldest ones are just able to go to a bar, and though their team made the Sweet 16 last year, this year it hasn’t been so hot. They got a chance to watch their school beat a conference rival, the No. 3 team in the country, in an exciting game on national TV. To expect them to contain their excitement because the Hoosiers won a national championship in 1976 is mind-boggling.

A lot of kids will never get to storm a court.

Not to dip the old authorial head into the frame here, but I went to Tulane University, and when I went to Tulane, we didn’t have a great basketball team. Our team was pretty terrible, in fact. My friends and I would go to the games, and watch, and hope that one day, maybe, our team would shock the world when Memphis or LSU came to town. It never happened. In my four years, there was never a chance when I got to sprint out on the court with my classmates and hug the players and celebrate.

If I could? Man, that would be awesome, because it looks really, really fun to run on a court after a win, no matter how big or important. If they have any excuse, why cheat kids out of this?

Sports are meant to be fun.

This is really the only argument that needs to be made. Sports are meant to be fun. Really, they are. We take them seriously, but they’re meant to be fun, meant to keep us distracted from boring jobs and taxes and cold weather and all the rest of the dreary stuff we put up with every day.

College is fun. Sports are fun. Storming the court is fun. If the kids are safe and not rioting over each other and ripping down the backboard, and the spirit is good, why are we getting mad about kids having fun?

And that is what answers the big question posed above in the headline.

When is it appropriate to storm the court in college basketball? Whenever. Whenever the fans in attendance are happy and excited enough to run out and jump up and down and make the players feel special, that’s enough. It shouldn’t have to be more than that.

CORRECTION: The article initially stated that some students at IU were born in 1996, when most were likely born in 1995 or earlier. We regret the error.