Stadium Beer Sales Could Be The Answer To College Football's Drinking Problem

There are certain idiotic traditions you absorb by osmosis when you grow up in a college football town like I did, and many of those traditions center around drinking alcohol in a grassy field that doubles as a parking lot on gameday. In moderation, this is not a problem, but moderation and tailgating are often dueling ideals. Which is why a counterintuitive approach—more beer, not less—might turn out to be the best answer of them all.

Earlier this month, after permitting beer sales in suites and club-level seats in a pilot program last season, Ohio State quietly announced that it would begin selling beer stadium-wide at home games in 2016. As of 2015, 34 FBS schools sold beer during games, but that number is growing rapidly: Prior to 2008, only six schools sold beer at games. And it's happening at high-profile stadiums that draw massive crowds: At Penn State—the place where I grew up attending games and watching college students make fools of themselves before becoming one of those fools myself—they'll allow beer sales in "controlled areas" this season, and will likely expand to stadium-wide sales in the near future if things go smoothly. At Maryland and Texas, beer sales began in 2015.

First things first: Let us get the nakedly cynical money-grab element of this trend out of the way, and let us acknowledge the ongoing unseemliness of college football continuing to gradually professionalize itself while simultaneously clinging to the notion of amateurism. Last year, when Ohio State began selling to the suites, Cleveland.com's Doug Lesmerises asked Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith if the notion of college sports and alcohol sales being opposing concepts was gone.

"Gone," Smith replied. "They still are amateurs. But the old model, the way we think about it, is different."

That's a ridiculously contradictory statement, of course. Schools make money by selling beer, particularly smaller Group of Five schools that are seeking new revenue streams in an era of decreased attendance at games. At a school like Troy, selling beer can lead to $200,000 in additional revenue in a season; at Penn State, it could lead to other events beyond football being held at 107,000-seat Beaver Stadium. At Ohio State, the money will reportedly fund salaries for a pair of new campus police officers. And that may sound like an ironic twist, if you think that additional beer sales would lead to the need for additional police officers. But that may very well not be the case at all.

Ground zero for this experiment at major colleges was West Virginia, which had a severe binge-drinking problem at games when it permitted beer sales in 2011. Athletic director Oliver Luck saw people drinking far too much at pregame tailgates, and then sneaking alcohol into the games themselves, and leaving the games to go out and drink more and then come back in. So Luck proposed a solution: Allow beer sales inside the stadium, but don't allow "pass outs," the double-entendre laden policy that would allow fans to come and go from the stadium as they please. If you left the game, you weren't allowed back in; it was that simple. And from 2010 to 2014, gameday incidents involving the police at West Virginia games dropped precipitously.

"You know, you might as well face reality and try to control it," the chief of West Virginia's campus police said back in 2012. "And at least keep the environment as safe as you can. That was always my goal—to try and make the environment safe."

Said University of Maryland president Wallace Loh: "What people fail to realize is if you cannot get beer inside the stadium and once you are in the stadium you cannot exit, what are you going to do to get that buzz? You're going to drink yourself over the limit before you even come. Knowing they can buy a beer—and we limit it to two—is contributing to more moderate drinking."

Could this become the norm? As of now, the Southeastern Conference prohibits its member schools from selling alcohol to the general public. But suppose beer sales catch on at Penn State and Ohio State without issues, and then spread rapidly throughout the Big Ten. According to a 2015 New York Times story, West Virginia made approximately $500,000 on beer sales, and Texas made a mind-blowing $1.8 million on beer sales last season. Would the SEC really leave that money on the table?

Maybe, as Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs told Bleacher Report, the SEC doesn't require that additional revenue stream. But then, neither does the Big Ten these days. But this is one case where money and common sense would actually appear to converge: According to a study by the United States Sports Academy, the use of certain "best practices"—including higher price points—can help curtail many of the problems associated with selling beer in stadiums.

It would be nice if someday the powers that be would cop to the idea that college football isn't the rah-rah amateur pipe dream they believe it to be. But until then, I suppose, this is the closest we'll get to the sport embracing the reality of the circumstances that surround it.

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