Braxton Berrios, University of Miami
Photo: YouTube

Hands behind his back, head down, Braxton Berrios' silent perp walk Saturday night in front of more than 65,000 people was the loudest perp walk most people have ever seen. The Miami Hurricanes had just scored their first touchdown in what eventually became a 41-8 beatdown of Notre Dame.

The star University of Miami wide receiver with a 3.96 grade-point average and finalist for the prestigious Academic Heisman, the classroom equivalent to college football's highest individual honor, was keenly aware of history. Berrios, 22, was paying homage to history and his university's “Convicts” and “Thug-U” rap in the media. Berrios was not going to jail on Saturday night. He was just walking to the sideline, only imitating being arrested. He wasn't actually in trouble.

Off the field, cellphone video caught another beatdown.

Scenes like this happen pretty much on every football weekend in America.

Too many beers, too much alcohol, and an enormous amount of time to let it infiltrate your blood stream, skewing perspective, inhibitions and right and wrong, on what is already an emotional event, arrests at football games are on the rise.

And it's not college kids getting hauled out of a stadium and straight to jail. A week before Berrios' perp walk, Bridget Freitas, 30, a registered nurse, took a different kind of perp walk. It wasn't so much a perp walk as it walk a perp carry. As police officers struggled to remove her, the highly intoxicated barely conscious registered nurse, took two swings at police officers who were trying to remove her from the stands, one of who swiftly responded with a right to the face that would have knocked Mike Tyson out in his prime.

“All he did was react to her actions,” said John Rivera, president of Miami-Dade's Police Benevolent Association.

There were 23 ejections and two arrests that Saturday night at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami.

NBC affiliate KGW in Portland, Oregon, recently published a story titled “Beer, fights and bad behavior: Are college football fans getting too rowdy?”

Backed with data from the 2016 college football season, the story said at least 3,778 fans were ejected during the season and 1,102 fans were arrested at stadiums across the country.

First Coast News in Jacksonville, Florida, a sister publication of KGW, reported the University of South Carolina led the nation is arrests and ejections in 2016. The Gamecocks had 496 ejections and 37 arrests. The University of Wisconsin had the second highest ejection rate. Oregon, Oregon State and Nebraska round out the top five.