Sacramento State’s Lil Yachty performance ended early at the Homecoming football game Saturday, Oct. 18 due to safety concerns after the crowd breached  stage barricades.

Yachty had performed for less than 10 minutes when Sac State officials cut the concert short. More than 20,000 were in attendance at the Homecoming match, which was the largest crowd for a homecoming game ever and the third largest in Hornet Stadium’s history. 

Sac State said it will be implementing stronger crowd control measures and increased staffing and security for future events to reduce confusion about standards and protocols for the post-game concerts. Students and attendees will also be required to remain in the stands during future performances instead of entering the field.

Alina Fitch, a third-year political science and journalism major, said there wasn’t a communicated protocol for people entering the field. She criticized Sac State for not being prepared to handle the crowd for Yachty’s performance.

“I thought it was really unorganized, and it could have been put together a  bit better than it was. – The opening of the gates and letting everyone just run on the field without any protocol or any security. And the speakers were also really, really low,” Fitch said. “I don’t think Sac State was prepared for a concert that big.”

President Luke Wood said the concert ended early due to behavior from “community members,” not Sac State students. According to students who witnessed it, a fight between several unidentified men broke out near the food trucks during the second quarter of the Homecoming match. 

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Drew Harris, a second-year history graduate student, said he was at the front of the line where attendees lined up to enter the field for Yachty’s performance. Harris said it was not long after the fireworks show for the Hornets’ victory that people started to rush the field. 

“Eventually, the people in front of me started jumping the gate that was in place. Obviously, with that happening, the people behind us followed suit,” Harris said. “I was basically forced to jump the gate to avoid being crushed by the crowd that was coming from behind me at that point.” 

Harris said he was in the crowd near the front of the stage when the rapper called for a mosh pit, and the barricade began to falter from the force of the crowd.

“The crowd pressure got so intense that it eventually toppled over, and that’s when they called off the performance,” Harris said.

Harris said he feels the event could have been planned better overall, and he would still like to attend the next post-game concert featuring Quavo.

During an Instagram livestream yesterday, Yachty spoke on the post-game performance being shut down early.

The rapper stated that Sac State did not have the proper security measures. He said that, due to the front row having overwhelmed the barricades, attendees were falling and injuring themselves to get to the stage.

“It wasn’t safe; the kids were trampling each other,” Yachty said.

Yachty said that, though he wanted to continue performing, police shut the performance down after the barricades broke.

Yachty was paid $200,000 for an hour-long performance at OzFest, the University of North Florida’s annual Homecoming concert, on Feb. 1, 2025. His Sac State performance was originally slated for a 25-minute performance before being shut down after eight minutes. 

Amanda Guthrie, a fourth-year political science major, said she stayed in the stands when the crowds started rushing past her. She said people were bumping into her as they rushed onto the field. 

“I thought it was crazy that the security just took a step back and let it happen,” Guthrie said.

Guthrie said she goes to concerts all the time and that she was surprised by how unprepared Sac State’s event management was.

“President Wood came on stage and was like, ‘I need you guys to take a step back,’” Guthrie said. “I’ve gone to probably 100 concerts in my lifetime, and that is not a thing that happens.”

Guthrie said that right after Lil Yachty asked for the moth pit, things started to get chaotic. She said people in the crowd were already riled up during the performance, and that is when things escalated.

“That’s when people started pushing,” Guthrie said. “There was definitely a shift in the crowd, then the barricade broke, and they turned on the lights.”

Guthrie said she was disappointed by how everything was handled. She said that the barricades were definitely not secured properly.

“I volunteer with UNiQUE, and for Band Night, we had barricades,” Guthrie said. “I felt like we were able to secure them in a much nicer way than they did on that football field, and we didn’t have any issues.”

Natalie De La Huerta, a second-year kinesiology major, said she and her friends chose to stay up in the bleachers when they saw people beginning to rush onto the field.

“What was crazy is that the minute they opened up the field for everyone to go, you just see a swarm of people running. Not only that, but a lot of [little] kids running too,” De La Huerta said. “It was a mixture of audiences, college students, obviously, like freshmen, kids, some other random teenagers.”

Ezra Cortez, a third-year computer science major, said that after they entered the stadium for Yachty’s performance, staff had to call out for missing kids in the crowd. 

“Once we did get onto the field and we’re waiting for Lil Yachty, we had instances where kids went missing, and they had to call out to the crowd to secure the kids for the parents,” Cortez said.

De La Huerta said she felt most of the people she saw seemed to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol. She said she saw a few fights break out in the crowds during the performance.

“That’s a setting where there’s a lot of drunk people, so they could have easily been irritated,” De La Huerta said. “There were many people crowded against each other – a lot of shoving.”

De La Huerta said she was not surprised how the post-game concert went after people rushed the field. She said she has learned to expect this kind of behavior from the campus.

“Honestly, coming out of it I was like, ‘What do you expect? It’s Sac State,’” De La Huerta said. “My friends and I also joke about it. I’m like ‘Damn, we can’t have nothing nice. Somebody’s gotta ruin it.’”

She said as someone who attends concerts frequently, she was shocked by the amount of unpreparedness. Guthrie said it seemed like lack of security was the biggest issue.

Sac State will host Quavo for a post-game performance on Friday, Oct. 24, following the Hornets’ football match against the Montana Grizzlies of the University of Montana, where they will allegedly be implementing new safety protocols.

The State Hornet contacted Sacramento State administration for comment but did not receive any response by press time. 

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