When Maryland asked the Attorney General's office about regulating speech in Comcast, we frankly thought they were passing the buck, assuming that the A.G. would say, can't do anything, First Amendment, and then the University would shrug and say, see? Nothing we can do about it.
Only the A.G. tossed the ball back in their court, saying they could so do something about it.
So now Maryland has a problem: what are they going to do? Throw out 10,000 people for chanting "F--- you JJ?"
They can't control a chant in a crowd that big by pulling a few people out - what they'll get are worse chants, in fact. What they need is for someone to stand up and say, hey, knock it off. And the only guy who can do that is the head coach. Unfortunately, as illustrated by Sports Illustrated recently, the head coach can barely say good morning without cursing himself, and doesn't have the respect of his fans to pull it off anyway, and he knows it, which is why he won't try it.
Now, many of you will say, but Coach K curses too! K curses too! Gotcha!
Well, he does curse, but he also communicates in subtler ways, and does not hesitate to tell the crowd that if things don't straighten out, and pronto, he'll take his team and go home. He reinforces that sort of message by visiting with students before the game and saying, look, don't do this, don't go there, try and be positive.
It's really hard to imagine that happening at Maryland somehow. And anyway, while it's nice to see some level of concern about crowd behavior, it's only come up after the University and some alums felt humiliated about the JJ taunt.
The real issue is violence, and the threat of violence, and while stopping pottymouths from cursing in time on TV is good, making Comcast a place where visitors aren't scared of what will happen to them should be the real goal. A lot of good Maryland fans, and indeed the University, should be humiliated by that, rather than students cursing.