Colleges woo fans with beer
Move aims to bring people back to stadiums.
When BATON ROUGE, LA. —
LSU hosts Georgia on Oct. 13, The Chute and the Skyline Club are bound to be crowded with fans who would like a beer or three.
The Chute is on the ground floor of Tiger Stadium near the southern end zone. The Skyline Club offers a stunning God’s-eye view of the field and a vista beyond the stadium of Baton Rouge’s tidy downtown and the Mississippi River.
“When I’m at home, I drink beer,” said Lisa Boswell, a guest at The Chute on Sept. 22, when LSU hosted Louisiana Tech. “I’m used to going to Saints games, where you can have beer.”
Broad alcohol sales are still relatively new to college football, though. And nowhere are they more limited than in the Tigers’ league, the SEC, which bans the sale of alcohol at home games to general-admission guests.
LSU, where tailgates are so elaborate that it can be a challenge to persuade fans to leave their grills and their coolers and actually go inside, is defying a cultural bias against in-stadium alcohol sales while skating within the letter of conference rules in a bid to offer the model of a modern college football game day.
“Our competition isn’t necessarily going to some other games or going to the movies,” said David Taylor, LSU’s assistant athletic director for game and event management. “It’s staying home and watching it on your flat-screen.”
Across the U.S., alcoholic beverages have long been available to the muckety-mucks who spend thousands of dollars a year in season-ticket fees and donations for fancy suites and premium seats. And of course they are ubiquitous at professional sports events.
But there was long a taboo on alcohol sales to most ticket holders, in deference to the many underage students in attendance as well as to college sports’ appeal (or pretense) as an amateur, good-natured spectacle. Besides, there were always those tailgates.
In just the last few years, though, that taboo has begun to crumble. Several major programs have started selling beer to all legal guests. West Virginia was a pioneer among major-conference teams. Recently, the likes of Colorado and Arizona in the Pac-12, Texas and Oklahoma State in the Big 12, Wake Forest and Louisville in the ACC and Ohio State and Purdue in the Big Ten have followed suit.
The NCAA itself has allowed the sale of alcohol at the baseball and softball College World Series since 2016. Next year, it will allow such sales at the Division I basketball tournaments for the first time ever.
This pattern is partly a straightforward play for revenue. Notably, the Group of Five conferences, whose football programs are more parched for resources, have been ahead of the Power Five leagues in doing this.
But peddling beer is more broadly seen as a way to persuade fans who own high-definition televisions and comprehensive cable packages to come root for the home team.
Athletic directors know that average attendance for Division I football has declined nearly every year for at least the last decade. They speak of enhancing the game day experience the way coaches speak of converting on third down.
Selling alcohol at college games is not about adding a few million dollars to annual bottom lines but a longer-term strategy to convert new, fickle fans into more reliable ones, said Emily Golembiewski, a stadium consultant.
The shift, she said, “appeals to a crowd that probably isn’t going to the games right now.”
She added, “And it’s not the drinking crowd, it’s actually a more social crowd.”
But amid this trend toward liberalizing alcohol policies is the countervailing SEC ban on general-admission alcohol sales. Commissioner Greg Sankey said in an interview that the elaborate tailgate scenes that several teams are known for, along with intense in-stadium environments and variegated local laws on alcohol, help account for the rule.
“The bulk of our institutions have not supported a change at present to the policy,” Sankey said.
Several SEC schools, including Auburn and Texas A&M, have opened limited spaces at football or baseball stadiums for fans who wish to pay a small premium to buy alcohol.
“That’s consistent with our policy,” Sankey said of such experiments. “It’s not available throughout the stadium.”
This season, Florida opened a beer garden just north of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, in part to attract fans to the pregame Gator Walk, in which the players march from buses to the stadium through a throng of supporters. UF has also brought food trucks to a nearby closed-off portion of University Avenue.
LSU, in a part of the nation known for its distinctive, vibrant culture and delicious food, has been a self-proclaimed national tailgating champion even when the football team was not contending for actual national championships.
“For a number of years, it was the best thing on campus — and then you had to go to a football game,” said Gary Kleinpeter, whose 2-decadeold tailgate at one corner of Tiger Stadium will feature jambalaya and white beans for the Georgia game and spitroasted pig for November’s Alabama game.
LSU officials say they do not fear failing to sell tickets — the stadium nicknamed Death Valley, known for intimidating nighttime atmospheres, typically sells nearly all of its more than 102,000 seats. Rather, they worry about keeping seats filled, especially when the opponent is not a rival like the Gators or the Crimson Tide, but, say, Louisiana Tech.
Neither The Chute nor The Skyline Club has a traditional premium price. The Chute’s $20 entrance fee includes two drinks; Skyline Club prices, which range from $20 to $60 a game, are comparable to general-admission tickets. (One couple who drove in from Bossier City got seats in the Skyline Club simply because those were what came up on a ticketing website.)
To comply with SEC rules, The Chute has a single entrance, where guests’ proof of age is checked and they are then given wristbands, and the Skyline Club is accessible through an elevator bank, with IDs checked at the point of purchase. Alcohol may not be removed from either area.
The Skyline Club was sedate Sept. 22. Guests drank beer, wine or spiked seltzer. Several had babies with them. It felt like a backyard barbecue.
One guest, Steve Zeringue, had not bought any alcoholic drinks that night, he said. He had purchased a package of tickets in the Skyline Club so when his brother-in-law, a Georgia fan, came to town for the Bulldogs game, they would have the option.
“He likes to drink beer,” Zeringue said, adding, “We’ll see if we go back in the same car.”