College football’s many unique traditions are what can make the sport so engaging and rambunctious.
Texas Tech’s longstanding act of throwing tortillas on its field during games has been one of the sport’s most entertaining for decades, but it has been under fire as of late.
The Big 12 approved a rule change in August that features a “three-strikes” policy when it comes to objects being tossed onto playing surfaces, and the Red Raider faithful received a pair of unsportsmanlike penalties for breaking that rule during Saturday night’s 42-17 win over Kansas.
But while the program is struggling to manage its fan base’s tortilla tossing, it also now has another issue.
According to an article from Henry Greenstein of KUSports.com, Kansas head coach Lance Leipold revealed after the game that one of his staff members was actually hit by a “Swiss-Army-style knife,” which prompted the second foul.
“It’s ridiculous,” Leipold said. “It’s supposed to be for safety and things like that. It’s a culture that’s been accepted to a point and it hasn’t changed. And eventually somebody’s going to be seriously hurt, unfortunately.”
Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire and Leipold discussed the thrown objects after the game and both agreed that more must be done to prohibit things like this from happening in the future.
“We’ve got a new rule in this league and we know the rule, and we didn’t follow it, and we got penalized tonight, two 15-yard penalties, and he was frustrated on that side,” McGuire said. “We got to be better. We got to do a better job. We got to find a way to do a better job as a whole, all of us, and we will. We’ve got two weeks to have a better plan and get the point across of what the rule is. Because it’s going to catch up with us.”
Parker is currently the sports editor with the Enterprise-Journal in McComb, Mississippi. He's a graduate from Mizzou who has experience covering the Tiger football and basketball beats for SB Nation, and he's worked for a variety of sports news outlets in the past.
