It's not really the first incident of its kind, though in the 2010 BB incident with Orr at TT against Texas A&M, his crappy behavior was at more of a distance and didn't provoke physical action. But what if he had given the T A&M player the same gestures in his face from a foot away back then? Would there have been an incident? If anything from the tape of the 2010 incident, he seemed even more over the top back then.
How do you describe someone like Orr? Well, at TTech he's known as a "superfan," the kind who travels thousands of miles each year following the football and basketball teams and screaming his big lungs out for his team and emptying his back passage toward the opponent. He gets profiled on the university web sites, and the coaches laud him saying, "We can always count on Jeff." And of course they can. They know he's there behind the basket abusing the visiting players and working the home advantage and doing his obscenely creative best to get to the other team's best players. Until the shove, the school had never indicated it found any of his past behavior "unacceptable." And I'm sure he's a hero to TTech fans because he can provoke the other team's stars into suspensions because he's a well-placed superfan who can say anything he wants and the BB players are just NCAA lackeys who are all very well paid to take the abuse and turn the other cheek.
What nobody wants to get into about all this is the racial dynamics. Whatever, accept that he didn't sneak in any n-words under his breath after the more clearly heard "piece of crap" stuff. Still, you have the big fat white doofus hurling invective at players who are mainly all tall and black (okay, Orr probably did yell something like "You little white POS" at OK St's Phil Forte). If the solution to all this is just the same-old namby-pamby "They're college athletes and they have to be ready to be abused on the court and if they do react maybe they should even face criminal charges," then maybe the NCAA really should be paying the athletes for hardship duty, as there will be more of these incidents in the future. Sure, the generally directed "Visiting U succccks!" chants will continue to rain down from the student sections for any school that has a pulse, but until schools get proactive about enforcing conduct standards in the volatile sections of the arena, we're in for more shoving matches and some ugly questions about racial issues to follow.
