Halftime brawl leads to ejections in Bethune-Cookman vs. Grambling State football game

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Just before the start of the third quarter of Bethune-Cookman’s 31-23 loss to Grambling State on Saturday, Nov. 8, a brawl broke out, resulting in the ejections of five Tigers and four Wildcats.

Tempers flared as the teams came out of the halftime locker rooms at Eddie G. Robinson Memorial Stadium. They jawed at each other near midfield before it escalated into punches and players being thrown into benches on the Grambling State sideline.

Officials and coaches worked to separate the two squads.

As of Saturday night, no further disciplinary action has been announced, though the Southwestern Athletic Conference and both schools are expected to review the footage, according to a report by HBCU Gameday.

“When you play here, you’ve got to make sure as a coach, support staff, anything that all your players come down,” Grambling State head coach Mickey Joseph said during his postgame press conference. “If you’re going to walk down there and take your time, and now it’s three minutes and 30 seconds on the clock, and we’re standing on the stairs, and you’ve got four or five kids who are just walking down, taking their time, at the end of the day, I’m thinking, like, they know what they’re doing. They taking their time, so we try to give them their respect. So we’ve got to go. We can’t wait on two players. But they should never leave their players. Who leaves their players? Who leaves their players over there, knowing that we have to come down? That’s what I’m talking about.

“That’s the disrespect stuff. We’re not going to tolerate disrespect here at Grambling. You won’t disrespect us. We’re going to meet disrespect with disrespect, because be responsible, get your kids out the locker room, make them get to the field. They came down on the field. They walked on the field. That’s disrespecting the game first of all. That’s my perspective, and I told them after the game. I said, ‘You can’t leave your kids up there.’ So we talked. I know I’m going to hear from my AD. I’ll talk to my AD. He’ll talk to his AD.”

The Tigers led 24-20 at the time of the skirmish. They clinched the victory with quarterback Hayden Benoit’s fourth touchdown of the game in the fourth quarter.

Bethune-Cookman’s only points of the second half occurred on Juan Dominguez’s third field goal, a 42-yarder with just over a minute remaining. QB Timmy McClain accounted for two touchdowns in the first half.

The Wildcats fell to 5-5 (4-2 SWAC) this season while Grambling State improved to 7-3 (4-2 SWAC).

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Halftime brawl breaks out in B-CU vs Grambling State football game

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