Two Oakland Athletic League high school football teams will have multiple players suspended for over half of the season and thus forfeit their upcoming game as punishment for a mid-game brawl that abruptly ended a game on Friday.
“The message has to be strong,” Oakland Section commissioner Franky Navarro told the Bay Area News Group on Tuesday afternoon. “This type of behavior is not going to be tolerated.”
Reigning league champion McClymonds was leading visiting Fremont-Oakland 21-0 early in the second quarter when a pair of McClymonds players tackled a Fremont ball carrier on a kickoff.
Navarro said that the Fremont player then threw a punch, which set off the fight. The majority of players on both teams then went onto the field.
The league commissioner had not determined how many players would be suspended when he spoke to this news organization on Tuesday afternoon.
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McClymonds coach Michael Peters later confirmed to this news organization that seven of his players will be suspended six games, although the school plans to appeal and hopes to reduce the punishment to three games.
He believed that the reason so many of his team’s players were on the field when it happened was because it was a change of possession, and that most of his players involved were just trying to break up the fight.
Peters also promised that such a situation will not happen again.
“We shouldn’t have conducted ourselves in that way,” Peters said. “That’s not Mack football.”
Fremont coach Tyler Newell did not respond when reached for comment by this news organization.
Navarro added that because coming onto the field from the bench area during an altercation is an automatic one-game suspension, neither team has enough varsity players to play this week, and that the teams are not allowed to bring up JV players en-masse on short notice.
McClymonds will forfeit its game against Castlemont and Fremont will do the same against Oakland High.
This will go down as McClymonds’ first loss to a league opponent since 2009.
After this week, the teams will be allowed to move players from the JV to varsity in order to continue the varsity season.
McClymonds has only 19 players on the team, and is expected to bring up at least seven or eight players from its 24-man JV team.
McClymonds will see its record drop to 3-4, while Fremont will fall to 0-6.