One of my favorite things to do with my kids is show them old sports highlights that would never, ever happen today. If I’m being honest, these usually involve extreme violence: As brutal and dangerous as sports can still be, it is worth remembering that it wasn’t long ago that a baserunner streaking home could just fully wipe out a catcher at full speed or that ESPN’s NFL pregame show had a segment dedicated to showing human brains being rattled around their skulls at maximum velocity as commentators cackled maniacally.
But I’m not sure anything blew their mind more than when I showed them Chris Chambliss’ home run to win the 1976 ALCS and send the Yankees to the World Series.
This video is incredible to watch, for obvious reasons: Chambliss, in the biggest moment of his career, is not only mobbed by thousands of people running on the field, but actually gets knocked down after passing second base and has to fight a guy from taking his helmet before giving up on touching home and just escaping into the dugout. (In a later interview, Chambliss would say he changed clothes and flagged down two cops to escort him to “where home plate used to be” so he could tap the plate.)
But what always strikes me is Howard Cosell’s call of the homer. Cosell spends more than 35 seconds putting the home run in context, explaining how exciting the series was, how hard the Royals played, what it meant for the Yankees to advance, without mentioning that there are thousands of fans on the field and they are tackling the guy who just homered. It doesn’t even occur to Cosell to point it out. The guy running the bases is getting looted while he’s trying to score, and it’s just … normal.
It wasn’t just normal, in fact: People liked that this happened. Listen to what Cosell says when he finally acknowledges the fans: “Look at them mob Chris Chambliss. What a season he’s had! What a series he’s had!” Cosell seems to see the assault as an honor … even a reward! And the thing is: He’s right. It is exciting to watch. The fun of sports is the ability to allow us to step outside of ourselves and lose our ever-loving minds. If we acted rationally and logically, if we were truly prudent and efficient with our time and our money, we wouldn’t be watching sports at all.
Sports are about losing it. Those fans were losing it. And it was fun to watch. Honestly: It still is.
On Friday night, Virginia pulled off a rousing, wild 46-38 double-overtime upset of then-No. 8 Florida State in Charlottesville. It was the first victory for Virginia over a top-10 team at home in 20 years, which is to say, five cycles of Virginia undergrads have arrived at campus, gone to college football games, gotten their degree and left since the last time the Cavaliers had a win as big as that one. Which means you know what happened:
VIRGINIA HAS DONE IT!
For just the second time this season, a top-10 team has fallen to an unranked opponent 😮 pic.twitter.com/JQJ275xSaG
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) September 27, 2025
Even in the annals of field stormings, that’s a pretty intense one, with thousands of college students sprinting onto the field the very moment Tommy Castellanos’ pass fell incomplete, to the point that the players on the field, the ones who were just milliseconds earlier trying to win an important football game, seemed to vanish instantly. (Seriously, FSU wide receiver Squirrel White disappeared right into the earth. It is scary to watch.)
The moment, in a human sense, is an undeniably dangerous one, and indeed, 19 people received medical treatment in the wake of the field rush, a number that feels like it could have been worse. It was a field storming, but another way you might classify the incident is an invasion. In a fundamental sense, it is at the very least trespassing: If any one of those tens of thousands of people had stepped on the field 10 seconds earlier, they’d have been laid flat by security and would likely have spent the night in jail.
These are also not the first 19 people ever to be injured by fans running on the field in celebration; it has been more than 20 years since an Arizona high school basketball player won a game on a breakaway dunk and was tossed to the ground by rampaging fans so violently that he suffered a stroke. This has been a problem for decades, and one that has not gotten less dangerous.
But it is a problem that has not been solved, and it has not been solved for a simple reason: Though these field stormings and court rushings are scary, most are also — let’s not kid ourselves here — awesome.
I mean, they are. They obviously are. And all evidence points to everyone generally agreeing that they are awesome. Every highlight from the game, every story about Virginia’s victory, led with the fans running on the field. The ACC fined the University of Virginia $50,000 for the field storming, and the university was so shamed by the fine and the whole incident that, in the official story on the UVA website about the game, the lead photograph is of Virginia fans streaming across the field. Virginia coach Tony Elliott didn’t sound too appalled either.
“Man, how fun was that?” Elliott said afterward. “That’s what Scott Stadium is supposed to be like. And that’s what I envisioned when I decided to take the job here: the potential. Really, really proud of the students and the fans for showing up. It made a difference.”
Field storming is exuberant, it is unhinged, it is out of control and — let’s not forget this part — it looks fantastic on television, four things that happen to be exactly why people love college sports so much. Field storming has been legislated out of professional sports for a variety of reasons, foremost of which is an increased police presence at pro sporting events, but I think it goes beyond that. There is a certain professional attitude fans have toward their pro sports teams, too.
You spend a lot of money for tickets, you treat the game as escape and diversion, you understand that the world outside of the event you’re attending exists and has consequences, you know that you’ll still be watching this team the rest of your life because you’re aware of the basic constraints of time and space.
This makes you the exact opposite of a college student.
That is, remember who is storming these fields and these courts: irresponsible, foolish, totally-lacking-in-basic-perspective college students. Perhaps there are exhausted carpool parents and 90-year-old alumni somewhere in their sprinting onto the Scott Stadium grass, but I sure can’t see them anywhere. These kids are being stupid and absurd and reckless and not thinking about anything other than what’s directly in front of their faces.
I’m not sure there’s a better description of what being in college — and being a college football fan, really — is supposed to be like than that.
That’s the real reason, I suspect, field stormings still happen in college in a way they’ll never happen in the pros again: Because college football makes you so passionate about it that you lose all sense of reason and perspective. And that is, in the end, what sports are supposed to be.
Back in 2013, NC State pulled off a stunning men’s college basketball upset against Duke and, as tends to be the case when teams beat Duke, the fans ran onto the court. Well, not all fans ran onto the court. A young man named Will Privette, who has used a wheelchair his entire life, was the first one on the court, captured in a video that still blows my mind 12 years later.
Privette had zero regrets.
“It was the dumbest thing I’ve done in college,” Privette told USA Today. “But it was awesome.”
That is the essence of college, and college sports, and the absurd importance we attach to it. It’s what we love about it most. It’s what makes it different.
There are so few moments in life in which we have the opportunity to completely lose our mind, in which we actively leap and yell and hug and dance and scream and, yeah, run run run. When’s the last time you had a moment in your life like that outside of sports? This is what sports are for. It’s not normal that they do this. But also: It’s normal.
Look, storming the field is dangerous and bad and you shouldn’t do it and tsk tsk tsk, yes, yes, we can say all the things a responsible person is supposed to say, and we will be right to say them. But the game Friday night was more fun because the fans ran on the field like that. You know it, I know it, we all know it. The next one will be more fun because of it too, and so will the next one after that.
(Photo: Geoff Burke / Imagn Images)
