“I’m not convinced at all that we should play this game again — here or there or anywhere — unless we can protect our fans, our band, and of course our athletes,” Harreld said, adding that he expected to be able “to work through this.”
“If for some reason one party or the other doesn’t come to the table,” he told the paper, “then no, why would we?”
Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard had this to say:
“Chief Newton and his team, fully investigated to the best of our ability, those five incidents, and concluded that it was going to be really tough to know exactly what happened,” Pollard said.
One of the incidents involved the band leaving the field after the game, Pollard said. He said the misinformation spreading is an image of the band walking off the field to the bus and being “attacked by Cyclone fans.”
“Have this vision: It was 30 minutes after the game, and the only people remaining in the football stadium were the Iowa marching band and the Iowa State marching band,” Pollard said. “… Our security personnel advised the Iowa marching band it would be best for them to exit to the east through Gate 1 like our band did and had no issues because the gate was wide open.
“For whatever reason the Iowa marching band did not do that,” Pollard said. “They chose to leave the field through the west side of the Jacobson building where there will thousands of people still shoulder-to-shoulder in a snail’s pace trying to work through that small entry way. The Iowa marching band marched in formation playing their instruments through the back of that crowd and essentially forced their way through a crowd there was no place for anybody to move to.”
