EJ Liddell led the Ohio State Men’s Basketball team with 23 points and 14 rebounds in their devastating loss against No. 15 seed Oral Roberts, 75-72 in overtime. After the game, the sophomore forward received threatening messages from disgruntled Ohio State fans that seemed to blame him for the team’s defeat. 

Liddell shared screenshots of the vulgar and threatening messages that he received via Instagram after the game on Twitter. These messages included racial and homophobic slurs, as well as death threats towards the 20-year old college student. One user wrote “You are such a f****** disgrace…. Don’t ever show your face at Ohio State again. We hate you. I hope you die. I really do.” 

Ohio State University has now reached out to the authorities following these messages and the university’s athletic director, Gene Smith, promises police involvement on the matter. “The threatening social media attack E.J. Liddell faced after the game yesterday is appalling and will not be tolerated,” Smith tweeted Saturday morning. “To the few of you who have chosen to inappropriately rail against our players on social media, stop. Hate and derision have no place in Buckeye Nation or in civil society. If you cross the line and threaten our players, you will be hearing from the authorities. That I promise you.”

Liddell says that he isn’t fearful from the comments, but just wants to know why someone would ever say something like this to him over a basketball game. “Comments don’t get to me but I just wanna know why,” Liddell wrote on Twitter. “I’ve never done anything to anyone in my life to be approached like this.”

Perhaps these social media thugs should consider the fact that Liddell was the Buckeyes top performer in this game, although they still want to blame the loss on him? Basketball is a team sport and there is always plenty of blame to go around whenever a team faces defeat. However, even if he was the reason the Buckeyes lost (which he wasn’t), he is still a human being that deserves respect. These athletes give their blood, sweat and tears everyday to these collegiate sports programs, so I am sure there is no one more upset about this loss than they are. At the end of the day, fans need to spectate and know their place, I’m sure they would see things a lot differently if it were them out there under the bright lights on national television. 

Ohio State Head Coach, Chris Holtmann, issued a statement yesterday defending Liddell saying “EJ is an outstanding young man who had a tremendous sophomore season and he was instrumental in our team’s success. We will take the necessary actions here at the University to address this immediately.”

To the fans that thought verbally abusing this young man was okay, as if the pain of losing in an upset wasn’t enough, shame on you. There is no excuse for this kind of behavior under any circumstances, but especially when it comes to these amateur athletes that generate millions of dollars in revenue for these universities and barely get anything in return. 

Despite this minor setback, Liddell is a young player with an extremely bright future and still has two more years of college basketball to make a run in the NCAA tournament.