Hutzell: Military stunts at football games are great fun. Until someone dies.

Look up!

Navy Leap Frog skydivers were the only thing at Sunday’s Ravens game that turned out as the crowd hoped.

The blue-and-gold daredevils drifted through a blue October sky, trailing colorful smoke flares and flags into M&T Bank Stadium. The crowd cheered as they landed one after another at the 50-, 40- and 30-yard lines.

Baltimore lost to the Cincinnati Bengals in a second-half collapse. At least the 70,000 fans got to see the skydivers.

Will any of them enlist?

It’s cynical, I know. But that is the point of the exercise. Not fun. Not football. Not training.

No one will ever win the argument that this should end, that the military should not appear at football games.

Whether Navy parachutists at midfield in Baltimore or fighter jets over the Navy game Saturday in Annapolis, these stunts are just too popular, too patriotic, too much fun to surrender.

Then someone died.

Air Force Tech. Sgt. Ian Patterson fell to his death at the Alamodome in Texas on Oct. 17 as he rappelled into the Navy at UT San Antonio game-day festivities.

It wasn’t the first mishap involving demonstrations of military equipment and skills, but it may have been the first fatality. Patterson’s death demands that we ask whether these stunts — dangerous no matter how expertly performed — are worth the risk.

At the very least, Congress must review the safety of this tradition to make sure Patterson is the last to die.

“After tragedies like these, it is incumbent upon Congress to ensure that every possible precaution is being taken to protect the health and safety of our service members,” said Rep. Sarah Elfreth, Maryland’s lone member of the House Armed Forces Committee.

There is a deep connection between the military and football. The Naval Academy and West Point were among the first colleges to play the game, and their annual matchups date to 1890.

The military helped the sport move from elite colleges to an everyman cultural force, both on campus and in the pros. Even the language — offense and defense, aerial attack and ground assault — has long been noted as intentionally shared.

Today, football games are recruiting opportunities. Cheering young men and women in the stands see the skills and hardware on display and think, “Why not me?”

For a while, there won’t be more demonstrations like the one that killed Patterson.

His unit, the 6th Combat Training Squadron at Fort Stewart, Georgia, paused all rappelling demonstrations and training Friday until an Air Force investigation is completed.

An experienced instructor, Patterson was descending 150 feet to the field in Texas about 15 minutes before kickoff and apparently lost control of his ropes.

Other demonstrations continued, as they do every fall weekend.

Congress has examined ties between the military and sports before.

In 2015, U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake led the “Tackling Paid Patriotism” investigation and revealed that the Department of Defense paid millions to college athletic programs to stage these displays.

The Pentagon banned the practice, and Congress wrote the prohibition into the National Defense Authorization Act, the massive military budget bill.

Today, the costs are included in the Pentagon’s recruiting and training budgets.

Mishaps are rare, a testament to meticulous military operations planning, even when the events are as seemingly risk-free as football games. Mistakes still happen.

Twice this year, parachutists have been involved in minor accidents at college games. Both skydivers were veterans, not part of a military demonstration.

The Pentagon has no public tracker for demonstration mishaps.

But in 2021, four Army helicopters from the 101st Airborne flew level with fans in the top seats at Nissan Stadium in Nashville before the Titans-Saints game.

Four Air Force training jets flew a mere 16 feet above the press box at Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium in 2010, just before kickoff against Ohio State.

In Atlanta, two Navy aviators were permanently grounded after their F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets cleared the scoreboard and field lights by just a few feet before the 2009 Wake Forest-Georgia Tech game.

Maybe nothing was more eyebrow-singeing than the flyover before the 2000 Navy-Texas Christian University game in Annapolis, when a Hornet pilot flew at eye level with the press box. Witnesses said they could feel the afterburners.

Mistakes were made. Barometric readings were misinterpreted. Pilots were grounded.

Several years ago, when the number of military training deaths seemed to spike, Congress asked questions. The Pentagon began to track them more closely.

Any investigation of demonstrations would also have to ask a more fundamental question: whether the demonstrations provide a boost to enlistment worth the risks.

This all hits differently in Annapolis, where the Naval Academy crowd needs no recruiting.

“Please rise as we honor the memory of Air Force Tech Sgt. Ian Patterson,” the announcer at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium said before Saturday’s game.

UT San Antonio officials said they decided to play after a 10-minute delay because they didn’t know that Patterson had died. The Naval Academy was quiet until Friday.

“The United States Naval Academy extends its deepest condolences to the family, friends, and fellow service members of Tech Sgt. Patterson,” said Cmdr. Kara Handley, an academy spokesperson.

After the 4,000-strong brigade of midshipmen marched onto the field Saturday, Navy Cmdr. Sean Delaney returned to his alma mater in spectacular fashion.

He led a pair of Super Hornets from Naval Air Station Patuxent River over Annapolis, thrilling the crowd.

“Look up!”

The cheers blended with AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” as the jets flew past, gone in a heartbeat. A single parachutist replaced them, drifting down with the blue-and-gold Naval Academy flag trailing behind.

Saturday’s homecoming game against the University of North Texas was another loss for the home team.

The fans in Annapolis roared again after the third quarter, when Delaney, a 2009 academy grad, walked onto the field to wave to the crowd.

We should all be grateful he and his crew landed safely.

Congress should make sure everyone else makes it home, too.