On Saturday afternoon, one of the ugliest incidents in recent college basketball memory occurred near the end of the 2011 Crosstown Shootout rivalry game between Cincinnati and Xavier. From the trash talk before the game to the first round of suspensions that were handed down Sunday, it has been a crazy 24-plus hours already. With much of the broader sports nation focused on the holiday season and the NFL this weekend, we thought it would be worth a brief rundown of how we got here for those who may have missed it.

The Crosstown Shootout Devolved Into Chaos Saturday (ESPN)

The Set-Up.

As our now world-famous correspondent Fake Gimel (@fakegimel) noted in his game recap, the Crosstown Shootout rivalry is naturally filled with quite a bit of emotion and in this year’s edition, those emotions bubbled over. In addition to the pre-existing animosity between the schools just from being local rivals, Cincinnati’s Sean Kilpatrick added some bulletin board material when he suggested on a local radio station that Xavier’s All-America candidate Tu Holloway would not start for the Bearcats. Of course, such a statement is an absurd suggestion, but when you are in a rivalry sometimes something as idiotic as that fans the flames. Despite the pregame hype and the taunts of Xavier students as the Musketeers took command of the game, it was a spirited but relatively clean game aside from a halftime incident where XU’s Mark Lyons was confronted by Cincinnati’s Octavius Ellis before officials broke it up.

The Incident.

While we cannot comment on what was being said on the court between the players on both sides leading up to the altercation, reports indicate that things escalated when Holloway began to chatter at the Cincinnati bench in the waning seconds of the game. A few Bearcats responded and then things went downhill. Quickly.

Our first view is the general television view that many of you had.

While that looks bad enough, this view from the student section makes it look even worse.

Bearcats Blog does a frame-by-frame review of the incident that’s worth a look too.

The Aftermath.

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Immediately after yesterday’s horrendous brawl during the Crosstown Shootout, there were calls from throughout the college basketball world for significant suspensions to be handed out to players from Cincinnati and Xavier. The two players who received the most criticism were Cincinnati’s Yancy Gates and Cheikh Mbodj for their vicious attack on Xavier’s Kenny Frease. Gates was caught on camera punching Frease in the face and Mbodj was seen stomping on Frease while he lay defenseless on the floor. To be fair, Xavier is not without blame as they appeared to be the team that escalated the incident from a verbal one into a physical one and it was Musketeer All-American guard Tu Holloway who gave us a memorable “body bag” comment after the brawl.

Mick Cronin Did A Great Job In The Press Conference Yesterday

However, once the press conference started (first tweeted by our own Fake Gimel), a large portion of the public and media were appeased by the thoughtful (or well-rehearsed) comments of Mick Cronin and Chris Mack. Throwing in phrases like “no excuses,” “grow up,” “full responsibility,” “zero excuse,” and “represent an institution of higher learning,” Cronin won praise from many media members including CBS’s Gary Parrish — trust us, there were more, but we aren’t digging through Twitter to find those responses — for the way he handled the press conference (full video here). Perhaps it was a sincere belief that Cronin would in fact do “the right thing,” which many believed was at least to hand out a pair of 10-game suspensions and potential dismissal from the team for Gates and Mbodj. It turns out that the punishments fall well short of that, as those two players and Octavius Ellis were each suspended for six games and Ge’Lawn Guyn was suspended for one game. All four players will also have to serve some form of community service.

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