SAVANNAH, Georgia — Changing fan culture at athletics events — difficult as that may be — probably is the best means of preventing excessive postgame celebrations, says an academic expert on fan behavior.

“Here’s the quandary that we face,” said Dan Wann, professor of psychology at Murray State University, speaking at the NCAA Postgame Crowd Control Summit April 8. “No one in this room wants to reduce the enthusiasm that fans feel for the team, but you’re trying to curb their enthusiasm so nobody is getting hurt. What makes it difficult is that you want them to be just as excited as they always were, but you want to do it in a way where people aren’t getting trampled and getting hurt.”

Research by Wann and others provides insight into why fans behave as they do during and after sporting contests — including reasons why they engage in actions ranging from berating game officials to rioting in the streets after a contest, as well as factors that help determine the severity and scope of those actions.

In the case of postgame celebrations, reasons why fans storm the football field or rush the basketball court range from a high degree of self-identification with a team — “everything that happens to a team happens to them,” Wann explained — to a willingness to be swept away as a participant in an exciting or fun event. Meanwhile, factors such as alcohol use fuel the aggressiveness behind such actions.

A summit participant, Athletics Director Craig Littlepage of the University of Virginia, illustrated Wann’s observations by recalling students’ reaction to an incident at a football game where several fans were trampled.

“There were several dozen fans, mostly students, who were in the emergency room,” Littlepage recalled. “Some had been taken off the field to the hospital on stretchers with broken bones; several had neck braces. The statement made to me by some of these fans was it was fun and they would do it all over again.”

The reasons and factors behind such incidents may vary from situation to situation,  but Wann said the “script” fans follow in postgame celebrations usually is consistent, regardless of how big the event may be or how many fans are involved.

“Victory riots — and how people act in a victory riot — are now part of the culture,” Wann said. “Not just the fact that they occur, but the behavior in these riots is very well scripted.

“They’re not just going down to steal the bench — and you wonder why, because that’s where their heroes sat, and it’s a lot easier to pick up. Why not steal a football, or the pylon? They go for the goal posts, because that’s the way it’s always been.”

Wann suggested that university officials need look only to other venues to understand how fan culture at athletics events is distinctive from other situations where crowds gather — and perhaps to gain insight into ways of changing the culture.

“Think of the emotional response that individuals often have after a religious meeting like a revival, or after a very intense movie — positive or negative. It could be the best ending ever for a movie, and no one would walk up and tear down the screen, because a culture has developed for how you’re going to express your euphoria.”

Applying that point more directly to campuses and to athletics events, Wann noted that students who pay tuition to attend classes do not treat the classroom the same way they may act in an arena after buying a ticket for a game — in other words, they don’t feel entitled to “do anything they want.”

Likewise, not all intercollegiate athletics events produce dangerous postgame celebrations.

“How much security is there at the College World Series to keep (fans) from going on the field? Because of the culture there, you don’t need it; they’re policing themselves.”

Wann believes that encouraging fans to police themselves ultimately will prove more successful than beefing up security to discourage fans from leaving the stands. But he also acknowledges changing the culture is easier said than done, especially when fans copy behavior they see on television.

And even as summit participants talked about ways of controlling or managing crowds at games, they also took note of a few generally successful attempts to channel fans’ enthusiasm into more constructive behavior, or on the other hand to spark peer pressure to discourage dangerous actions.

One such effort, at the University of Washington, may be having an impact on both counts. There, men’s basketball coach Lorenzo Romar and school administrators actively support a program called “Dawg Pack Fundamentals” that on one hand promotes positive behavior as attributes of Dawg Pack membership, while also seating nonstudents as well with athletics staff members in three or four “buffer rows” between students and the team benches and scorer’s table.