College football is a magnificent sport with rabid fan bases all across the country. Some of those fan bases, however, take their fandom a bit too seriously, with LSU serving as just the latest example.
Brandon Harris tossed a pair of interceptions in LSU’s season-opening loss to Wisconsin. One of those came with less than a minute remaining and cost the Tigers a shot at continuing a drive that could’ve resulted in a game-winning field goal.
Harris’ play didn’t sit well with a certain (cretin?) segment of the LSU fan base as, in a radio interview Wednesday morning, former LSU quarterback Jamie Howard revealed that Harris as well as some family members were subjected to death threats in the aftermath of the Week 1 loss. From Ross Dellenger of the Baton Rouge Advocate:I’ve tried to give him a little (advice) recently,” Howard said on ESPN 104.5 FM’s Culotta & The Prince morning show. “He was having a really hard time getting the death threats. That really shocked him.”
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“It shook him up when he got the death threats,” Howard said later in the radio interview. “The only advice I’ve given him is, ‘The truth of the mater is everybody’s going to be watching you from the stands, how you handle yourself while you’re on the bench and how you deal with Danny and the coaching staff, but all of those people don’t matter. The only people that matter is what your teammates see. If they need you to go back into the game at some point, they need to be confident in you and see that you’re confident.
Again, this is just a very small segment of this particular fan base, but, for the millionth time, get a life people. Seriously. How miserable must your life be that you feel the need to threaten violence and/or death to 18-22-year-old football players over the results of a game?
Harris, incidentally, kept his starting job for one more game when, after Danny Etling replaced him in Week 2 and energized the offense, he was benched in Week 3 in favor of the Purdue transfer. Etling will again start this weekend’s game against Auburn.