Schools push for autonomy on alcohol ban

Alabama Athletic Director Greg Byrne discussed the possibility of the SEC lifting its stadium-wide alcohol ban on WJOX in Birmingham last week.

He didn’t voice total support of the lifting the ban, but he did say “some schools” would like to handle it on their own rather than have it be an SEC mandate.

“I know there are some schools pushing for basically the autonomy for you as a university to decide what you want to do rather than have it be what you do collectively as a league,” Byrne said. “Right now, it’s a league practice. You can allow alcohol in some of your premium areas but that’s about it. But I know there are some institutions that would like to say, ‘Hey, let it be our decision for what we do.’ ”

There is precedent for this. The Big 12 allows its individual institutions to make their own decisions regarding alcohol in stadiums, and some schools recently have taken advantage of that freedom. West Virginia, for instance, has seen a decrease in stadium incidents since it began allowing alcohol sales in 2011.

“When I got there as athletic director in 2010, one of the things I heard most frequently was that we had a real problem with tailgating,” then-West Virginia AD Oliver Luck told the Philadelphia Enquirer in 2017. “You could leave at halftime, go out to your tailgate, chug a bottle of vodka and come back in.

“Now they’re finding that by selling beer in a controlled environment and not allowing people to come in and out, it’s cutting down on those incidents.”