It wouldn't take much for a reasonable person to agree with that assessment. Most sports fans have attended an event or two in which a few rowdy, inebriated idiots ruined it for the majority of the crowd that just wants to watch the game.
"This is a small segment of both teams' fans that when they get together, it is not a good environment," Niners President and Chief Executive Officer Jed York said at a news conference.
Yet instead of simply upping the security presence and limiting tailgating before and after games (although they did this, too), the Niners and Raiders have overreacted, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, requesting that the NFL stop scheduling the teams to meet during the preseason. Why?
"You see this in a preseason game where a lot of the people aren't even fans," York continued. "It was just people who aren't football fans who were here fighting."
Ahh. There it is. The violence, York implies, was caused because this was a preseason game, in which many of the fans aren't fans at all, but simply hooligans who got tickets from season ticket holders with no interest in these exhibition matchups.
In other words, York is saying that if this were a regular season game — and it could be, if only the players union would have given up its opposition to an 18-game season in the recent labor negotiations — those two people would not have been shot, that person would not have been beaten senseless and those dozen people would not have an arrest on their records.
Although it's difficult to be as low as fans who would turn a sporting event into a battle zone, York might actually have stooped lower. This is no time to take subtle digs at the recently inked collective bargaining agreement. It should be a time for the teams to get their houses in order and ensure fans a safe experience at every game until the end of time.
Cancelling the annual preseason game, which has been a tradition since 1967, is the teams' misguided statement that it is the nature of the matchup, rather than a total failure to protect fans, that caused this violence. San Francisco Giants fan Bryan Stow was beaten in the parking lot outside Dodger Stadium earlier this year; no one would suggest we eliminate all regular season Giants-Dodgers games, because neither management nor labor would have anything to gain by such an action.
The Niners and Raiders, however, would have much to gain by adding regular season games, which is why their preseason meetings may end. Eventually, fans may clamor for the Bay Area rivals to play once again. Then the teams will point to the incidents of 2011 and claim such a meeting is unsafe in the preseason. But if they add two regular season games, the teams will argue, they could schedule a meaningful matchup every year — increasing pressure from fans for an 18-game season that would shorten players' careers and water down the league's product.
Following an embarrassing display of humanity, the Niners and Raiders have chosen to act, not in a way that addresses the problem at hand, but in a way that eventually will line their pockets.
