Big brawls deserve the riot act.

Byline: Ron Bellamy The Register-Guard

Monday, Mike Bellotti took some time in his meeting with the Oregon football team to discuss the brawl that broke out during Saturday's game between Miami and Florida International.

In that, certainly, he wasn't alone. You figure every coach in the country, college and high school, talked with his team Monday about that brutal scene, or should have. It is a teachable moment that can't be ignored.

The images - players using helmets as clubs, players stomping and kicking a player on the ground, punches being thrown - are disgusting and frightening, and if you want to tell yourself that, well, that's just the way the Miami program is, you're kidding yourself.

Like the incident involving the Indiana Pacers a couple of years ago, you can never say that will never happen again. You can just hope that enough preventative measures and messages narrow the odds.

"It's a horrible thing to happen," Bellotti said Tuesday. "It's terrible for the image of college football. It's terrible for the people involved. I've been in situations like that as both a player and a coach, and it's no fun, it's a scary deal. People can get really seriously hurt.

"I told our team that, one, I would never accept that, and two, you don't leave the bench, you don't get involved. It's frustration and anger that pushes people over the top, and you have to be able to control that.

"The second thing is the legal issues beyond playing football or not playing football. There are assault charges that could be filed. You hit somebody with a helmet and you could kill them. ..."

In my memory, there have been a couple of instances involving the Ducks in the past 20 years where the match was dangerously close to the powder keg. Five years ago, cornerback Rashad Bauman got into a skirmish with a couple of Trojans before the Oregon-USC game in Autzen Stadium; it was brief but intense, and coaches were able to break it up before it blew up.

In 1992, when Oregon won at Washington State, there was a bench-clearing melee in which punches were thrown and five players - three Cougars and two Ducks - were ejected. I remember Oregon coach Rich Brooks ripping the cord out of his headset as he tried, unsuccessfully, to keep his team from leaving the bench. I remember how deeply disappointed he was by that behavior.

In retrospect, the penalties were extremely light; there were no follow-up suspensions by the Pac-10. By unfortunate necessity, there's a different climate now, and should be.

Bellotti said the Oregon-WSU incident 14 years ago pales in comparison to two altercations he experienced previously - a "huge brawl" between Sacramento State and UC Davis players during his senior year with the Aggies, and a postgame incident involving a player swinging his helmet as a weapon when Bellotti coached at Cal State Hayward.

Of the Miami-FIU debacle, Bellotti noted "those are riot-type situations where things get out of control, and as a coach, you're pretty powerless, once that thing starts going."

And yet, Bellotti said, he believes that "our team would handle that. We practice control. We practice hard, but if guys get in fights I make sure they understand that is not allowed. You don't practice that way.

"Your aggression happens from snap to whistle. The guys who do it after the whistle, in my opinion, are the guys who are trying to prove something they couldn't prove while the game was being played."

Penalties for those involved in the Miami-FIU brawl have varied; two FIU players were kicked off the team, more than two dozen other players have received one-game suspensions or indefinite suspensions. "If there's one perpetrator, that person has to pay the price, and maybe the ultimate price," Bellotti said. "I don't know. I would hope I would never be put in that situation. ..."

Interestingly, while the NCAA gets ridiculed sometimes for penalizing athletes for excessive celebrations, deeming that behavior unsportsmanlike conduct, arguably that kind of taunting should draw stiffer penalties, including ejections, because such actions can be so incendiary.

(Perhaps if the visiting team opened that game or the next game with 15 yards in penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct, and if its athletic department were fined $10,000 by the Pac-10, players would be less likely to dance on the logo of the opponent before a game, as Arizona did at LSU this season, or after it, as Washington did at Oregon a few years ago.)

That sporting events are volatile settings was underscored two weeks ago at Cal, when Bellotti made a point of staying at the end of the tunnel from Memorial Stadium, warning his players not to respond to heckling Cal fans as the Ducks climbed exposed stairs to the locker room after their defeat.

"I just didn't want any verbal retaliation," Bellotti said. "I told our team that we're not going to change what they say or what they think by what we say back to them. I didn't want somebody throwing something at our players, or something like that. They can throw verbal insults, but I didn't want to create any situations."

As Saturday proved, a situation can become something truly ugly in a heartbeat.