How should broadcasts deal with legal challenges?

During a three-decade career as a prominent ESPN play-by-play broadcaster, Dave Pasch says he has been at the microphone for two college basketball games that ended in a storming of the court. One occurred earlier this month when unranked LSU upset Kentucky as time expired at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge. La. Pasch this week recalled a conversation he and analyst Jay Williams had with an LSU athletic department staffer before the game.

“We asked, if they beat Kentucky, will they storm the court?” Pasch said. “He said, ‘No, we’re not storming the court here. We’ve beaten Kentucky before.” Well, they won with this crazy shot in the last second and of course they stormed the floor.

In the last sequence of the gamecan you clearly hear Williams saying, “Didn’t we talk today about whether LSU has the proper protocol in place for a legal storm?” As ESPN’s cameras broadcast a wide shot of LSU fans rushing onto the field.

The court storming issue became national this week after Wake Forest fans ran onto the floor of the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum following a win over Duke on Saturday. Cameras captured video of multiple fans making contact with Duke star Kyle Filipowski, who eventually limped off the field, prompting Duke coach Jon Scheyer, furious at a postgame news conference, to ask, “When are we going to storm ban from the court? ” Last month, Iowa star Caitlin Clark clashed with an Ohio State fan after the Buckeyes upset the Hawkeyes in Columbus, Ohio.

ESPN producer Eric Mosley and director Mike Roig estimate they have worked 16 to 18 college games where one team’s fans have stormed the court. Some of those court rushes occurred when a team pulled off a home upset of perennial heavyweights Duke, Kansas or Kentucky. Roig directed Arkansas’ 80-75 win over Duke on Nov. 29, and you can watch the wide shot clipped by Roig as fans filed onto the Bud Walton Arena floor.

Mosley said production planning for storming takes place well before tip time. ESPN production crews look in advance for a safe place where their reporter and camera operators can interview a winning coach and player. Directors like Roig hold meetings with camera operators hours before the match to discuss protocol and different scenarios, including storming a court. The camera setup is such that viewers may gain access to many access points. For a regular-season college basketball game, there are usually five unmanned hard and robotic cameras. These are located in positions that are safe from the crowd. Then there are three handheld cameras controlled by operators located on the baselines and center court. (The Wake Forest-Duke overhead camera got the best shot of what happened to Filipowski.)

“One of the first questions we ask when we get on site to the (sports information director) for certain games is if there is an appetite for storming the court or if security will allow that,” Mosley said. “We find out where the student section is and what the security situation is there. We ask where can we get our cameras and reporter to meet a coach and star player for that post-match interview? We’re trying to get ahead of that as early as possible because we don’t want to get caught in a position where our people like Holly Rowe, Jess Sims, Kris Budden and our camera operators are unsafe. We don’t want them to be caught and trampled. In most cases we have been quite successful.”

The play-by-play broadcaster for the Duke-Arkansas game was Dan Shulman, who estimated that he has called 20 to 25 games involving lawsuits during his career as an ESPN broadcaster. (Shulman is also the TV voice of the Toronto Blue Jays.)

“As nice as they may look on TV, I’ve always been concerned about what might happen,” Shulman said. “I remember storming the court at a Louisville-Charlotte game I was playing, and Doris Burke, who was the sideline reporter for the game, was trying to get an interview with the Charlotte coach, and I concerned about her safety. It was complete chaos on the field.

“Whenever there is a legal challenge, it is difficult for us at the table to really see much of what is going on. All we can really see are the people closest to our table. Sometimes the student section is behind our broadcast location, so knowing that they are on their way to court can obviously be a little unsettling when trying to navigate a broadcast. I think for the most part people on television hope that when this happens, it’s all in good fun and no one gets hurt. There is no doubt that it is a good picture on TV that many viewers enjoy. But for me the risk outweighs the reward.”

Wake Forest fans took over their home field after Saturday’s win. An injury to Duke’s Kyle Filipowski has reignited the court storming debate. (Grant Halverson/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

Bob Fishman agrees with Shulman. Fishman retired from CBS Sports last year after a fifty-year tenure at CBS News and CBS Sports, directing 39 men’s NCAA Final Fours, including Michael Jordan’s title-winning shot in the 1982 title game and North Carolina State’s defeat of Houston the year on that. Fishman said he has been thinking a lot lately about storming the court and that he would never tell a cameraman to run onto the court during a storm to make sure they maintained a position under the basket and shot what they could.

“I’m pretty adamant about what I think needs to be done — you can’t ignore it,” Fishman said. “It’s not like a streaker running across the field during a football game and you don’t show it. I think you have to show it because it’s part of the story and especially now that players have been injured. How I would do it is take some kind of wide shot, maybe from a rear camera or a high beauty camera, as we call it. Then I made sure my cameras in the field recorded everything and fed that stuff into a tape machine. I would never put that on the air. But I do think you have to show something, which in my view would be a high chance.”

Broadcasters and production crews, especially at a 24/7 news channel like ESPN, have to follow the story to the end, whether they are live on the air or not.

“We have to remember that the documentation continues even when we are off the air,” Mosley said. “We have to treat it like a news story. For example, some Filipowski stuff happened after the crew had already logged off and the network had been switched to another game. We are repeatedly taught and told to stay there and document for as long as possible. That’s because someone is going to look for that stuff.

Mosley and Roig say they often think about how to document an assault on justice without glorifying the action.

“It’s a difficult question to answer,” Roig said. “You document and glorify it at the same time. As a director you follow that line. As directors, we are always taught that when that one person comes onto the court or field, you don’t show it to them. Because more people will do it if you show them. It’s wide and away. But this is a slightly different animal, right? We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of people entering the field. … You blur or glorify the line of documentation. You have to have the mentality that you document it, but at the same time you have to be careful about how you document it.”

During a segment on ESPN’s “First Take” on Monday, longtime ESPN college basketball commentator Jay Bilas was critical of sports networks glorifying court-storming.

“Years ago, when fans would run onto the field during a game, the network policy was not to show it because we didn’t want to encourage it,” Bilas said. “What does that say about the way we in the media now use these images? We can’t deny that we encourage it. Or at least tacitly approve. Everyone must accept some responsibility for this. I don’t think it’s right to allow this, but I know it will continue.”

Roig said: “It’s a really sensitive point because as directors it’s a great scene, right? You want to show that. But I’ve never had one before seeing that one last week (with Wake Forest-Duke) where it got to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore.

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(Top photo of the scene after Saturday’s Duke-Wake Forest game: Cory Knowlton / USA Today)