Bill would make flag planting at Ohio St. a felony
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Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Senior Writer
If an Ohio lawmaker gets his way, teams attempting to plant their flags in the middle of Ohio Stadium during Ohio State games will be dealing with more than just pepper spray.
Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams introduced a bill Tuesday that would classify flag planting at Ohio Stadium around Buckeyes football games as a felony.
The O.H.I.O. Sportsmanship Act, authored by Williams, comes in response to Michigan‘s attempt to plant its flag after a Nov. 30 win at Ohio State, which set off a brawl between the teams. Police employed pepper spray to separate players and other team personnel. Ohio State University police are investigating the incident, which involved multiple law enforcement agencies and resulted in an injury to an officer.
According to Williams’ bill, “No person shall plant a flagpole with a flag attached to it in the center of the football field at Ohio stadium of the Ohio State University on the day of a college football competition, whether before, during, or after the competition. Whoever violates this section is guilty of a felony of the fifth degree.”
A fifth-degree felony is the least severe in Ohio and carries a penalty of six to 12 months in prison, up to a $2,500 fine and up to five years’ probation.
Williams, a Republican, represents Ohio’s 41st district, near Toledo and the Ohio-Michigan border, where many Buckeyes and Wolverines fans intermingle. He told ESPN that the Ohio Stadium incident, along with several other college football scuffles around flag planting during rivalry weekend, caught his attention.
“After it happened at five separate games during Rivalry Week, and seeing that there was no immediate movement, I thought it was necessary to send a signal to our institutions of higher learning that they need to come up with policies to prevent this in the future so it doesn’t risk harm to our law enforcement officers or student-athletes or fans,” Williams told ESPN. “[Ohio State-Michigan] is the No. 1 rivalry in all of sports, not just college sports, and to see it devolve all the way down to this level, it just disrespects not only the institution, but the college programs themselves. More importantly, it provided a true safety hazard.”
Ohio’s two-year General Assembly closes next week, so the O.H.I.O. Sportsmanship Act likely will need to be reintroduced in the next cycle. Williams plans to do that if he doesn’t see further steps from the Big Ten, NCAA or individual schools to curb flag planting, describing the bill as “a shot across the bow, putting our institutions on notice.”
NCAA president Charlie Baker told ESPN’s Dan Murphy that there have been conversations in committees and by conferences about flag planting.
“I think the conferences are pretty serious, and so are the schools about taking a look at how they might create a more aggressive approach to dealing with that,” Baker said Wednesday.
The Big Ten issued $100,000 fines to both Ohio State and Michigan following the incident, but no other individual discipline has been specified. In reference to the fines, Williams said: “That’s pennies, that’s nothing.”
Michigan coach Sherrone Moore also mimicked flag planting while appearing on the videoboard at the school’s men’s basketball game Saturday at home against Iowa as the crowd roared.
“That indicates that that institution is not taking this incident seriously,” Williams said. “We’re bragging about it, and it’s going to continue in the future, and that’s going to cause increased risk, increased security costs and potential for violence, as a result of a college football game.”
Baker told Murphy that the safety of athletes is a major priority for the NCAA, which wants to have policies that discourage such incidents in the championships it oversees, adding that he hoped the rules would be similar across the board.
Williams said a criminal penalty was needed because those who travel across state lines and violate university policies likely would avoid any significant repercussions. Williams, who said he coached youth sports for 15 years, is a strong advocate of sportsmanship and noted that the bill would apply to Ohio State players planting flags after home games.
Williams earned his law degree from the University of Toledo. He described himself as “a Buckeye, through and through,” while adding that his family has a mix of Ohio State and Michigan fans.
“We have a great rivalry. I enjoy the rivalry, win, lose or draw,” Williams said. “That was a tight game. It wasn’t a blowout victory. You know, Michigan should have taken its victory, and we take our loss on the chin and live to fight another day, concentrate on the next week and the next year, the next recruitment period. But instead, we have to have this conversation.”
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Bill Connelly
The lengthy 2024 season has been over for more than a month, the transfer portal has settled down for now, and we’re waiting to find out if the sport’s powers-that-be are going to change the format of the College Football Playoff for 2025 and beyond.
It seems like as good a time as any to start talking about who might actually be good in 2025!
Early each offseason, I spit out initial SP+ projections, based on a forever-changing combination of returning production, recruiting and recent history. As always, those projections stem from three primary questions: How good has your team been recently? How well has it recruited? And who returns from last year’s roster?
SP+ projections are still a few days away, but let’s deal with that last question first. Who returns a majority of last year’s production? Who has done the best job of importing production from another team? Who is starting from scratch?
For a few years now, I’ve been attempting to expand how we measure returning production. The formula I created shifts with each new year of data and has had to shift a ton with the rising number of transfers. But the gist remains the same: High or low returning production percentages correlate well with improvement or regression. They might not guarantee a good or bad team, but they can tell us a lot. And in 2025, they tell us a lot about the state of college football.
Looking through the prism of returning production data of every FBS team, we’ll break down how the percentage of returning players is trending, what the numbers mean for your favorite team and which teams can expect to improve and which could regress in 2025.
Jump to a section:
Percentages | Transfers
Returning trends | What numbers mean
Likely to improve | Likely to regress
New York Mets left-hander Sean Manaea has been shut down for a few weeks due to a right oblique strain and will likely start the season on the injured list, manager Carlos Mendoza told reporters Monday.
Manaea, who is projected as the team’s No. 2 starter, went 12-6 with a 3.47 ERA with 184 strikeouts with the Mets in 2024, leading to a three-year, $75 million deal in December.
“The good news is … the tendon is not involved, the rib cage is not involved,” Mendoza said of the MRI results for Manaea. “It’s just straight muscle, so he’s going to be shut down for a couple of weeks — and then we’ll reassess after that. We’ve got to build him back up again. Safe to say that he’s probably going to start the season on the IL. … Once he’s symptom-free, he’ll start his throwing.”
It is the second injury to the Mets’ starting rotation after right-hander Frankie Montas was shut down for six to eight weeks on Feb. 17 after suffering a high-grade lat strain.
Kodai Senga, Clay Holmes and David Peterson are set to top the Mets’ starting rotation to begin the season. Paul Blackburn, Griffin Canning and Tylor Megill will compete for the final two spots until Manaea and Montas return.
The Mets have also lost reserve infielder Nick Madrigal for an extended period after he suffered a fractured left shoulder during Sunday’s spring training game against the Washington Nationals.
Madrigal, who is fighting for a roster spot, fell to the ground while throwing to first base after making a bare-handed play on a ground ball. He was originally diagnosed with a dislocated shoulder but further tests revealed the fracture in his non-throwing shoulder.
Mendoza told reporters that Madrigal, who signed a one-year deal with the Mets in January, will have a CT scan and will be sidelined “for a long time.”
Field Level Media contributed to this report.
TAMPA, Fla. — The Yankees will play Frank Sinatra’s version of the “Theme From New York, New York” only after home wins instead of after all games in the Bronx, going back to the original custom set by owner George Steinbrenner in 1980.
The Yankees said players and staff were tired of hearing a celebratory song following defeats.
After Sunday’s 4-0 spring training loss to Detroit at George M. Steinbrenner Field, the Yankees played Sinatra’s 1966 recording of “That’s Life,” a 1963 song by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon. The change occurred two days after the team ended the ban on beards imposed by Steinbrenner in 1976.
The team said various songs will be used after losses.
“New York, New York” first was played at the end of Yankees wins after Steinbrenner learned of Sinatra’s version from a disc jockey at Le Club, a Manhattan restaurant and disco, former team public relations director Marty Appel told The New York Times in 2015.
The song, with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, was first sung by Liza Minnelli for the 1977 Martin Scorsese film “New York, New York” and Sinatra performed it in a Don Costa arrangement for his 1980 recording “Trilogy: Past Present Future.”
For several years, the Yankees alternated the Sinatra version after wins and the Minnelli version following defeats. In recent years, the Sinatra rendition has been played after all final outs.
The Yankees said Friday that they were ending their ban on beards, fearing the prohibition might hamper player recruitment.
Hal Steinbrenner took over in 2008 as controlling owner from his father, who died in 2010.
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