Aaron Rodgers: Fans think they can say “whatever the hell [they] want”

The story of the week (Steelers receiver DK Metcalf initiating contact with a fan and getting suspended for two games) continues to generate reactions and opinions. A man who has become well known for some of his opinions chimed in on Wednesday, with an opinion or two of his own.

And everything he said on the matter is 100-percent accurate.

“I think there’s a mindset that you pay for a ticket, you say whatever the hell you want,” Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers told reporters from the Pittsburgh locker room. “I think there should be some code of conduct. Obviously, that was intentional, and I think there was some celebration afterwards, on [the fan’s] part. Obviously, [I] don’t condone what DK did, but I understand, you know, there’s been a lot of crazy comments sent my way over the years and, you know, the truth is that that would never happen face-to-face.”

Rodgers is right. I’ve said it for years. Fans who buy a ticket think it’s their birthright to drink as much overpriced beer as they want, and then to say whatever they want, to whoever they want. At every game, including the somewhat neutral Super Bowl.

Rodgers is also right that the things fans say to the players from the stands would never be said to them in a one-on-one setting. One, they think they’re protected from consequences for their words in a stadium. Two, most of them usually aren’t partially or fully inebriated when they’re not at a game. (We’re not suggesting the fan in the Metcalf situation was inebriated to any degree.)

Obviously, there already is a code of conduct. And the league continues to explore whether the fan in question violated it. (There has yet to be a single video of the interaction that includes the fan saying anything that sounds remotely inappropriate.)

The right way to handle verbal abuse from fans is to alert security. Metcalf’s version, as pushed by his camp to the media while the league’s disciplinary decision was pending, included a claim that he previously had complained to security in Seattle about the same fan. So Metcalf knows the protocol. For whatever reason, he chose to bypass it in Detroit.

Fan abuse happens everywhere. As one source who has been present in most NFL stadiums recently told PFT, the worst fan he has experienced attends Seattle games and is parked near the visiting team’s tunnel. “The guy is brutal,” the source said. “Vicious and mean.”

The source added that the Oakland Coliseum used to be the worst place for verbal abuse from fans.

So, yes, it’s a universal reality of in-person NFL football. But there are ways to deal with it properly. We saw on Sunday the way to deal with it improperly.

We also saw what happens when the team in question fails to intervene, which continues to be the most overlooked aspect of the entire situation. Either the Steelers don’t have a protocol for keeping players from approaching fans, or they do and it failed miserably as to Metcalf.

Look for that to change, as to all teams. Memos surely will be sent by the league, and consequences may be imposed on teams that fail to keep players from doing what Metcalf did. The potential for a very bad outcome (which the league and the Steelers avoided in this case) is real, and the outcome could be much worse than Sunday’s incident.

Of course, Sunday’s incident could still become problematic for the league, based on the fact that the league’s media outlet could be joined to the inevitable defamation lawsuit arising from the report that the fan used a racial slur and other wildly inappropriate language toward Metcalf.