The Ohio State University football team may have just finished a very successful regular season, but there’s something else even more successful that happened at the OSU football stadium this year: Beer sales. A whopping $1.1 million in beer sales.
That’s right. Beer. In a college stadium. Ohio State sold beer for the first time inside the stadium this year, and according to a statement that university officials gave to The Columbus Dispatch, it went swimmingly.
Here’s how that $1.1 million roughly breaks down: There were seven home games where beer was sold, meaning there were around $157,000 in sales each game. The stadium holds a max of 104,944 people — 30,000 of which are in the student section. This is college, so many of the people in the student section can’t buy beer (legally). For the sake of simplicity, assume that no one in the student section is drinking. That means that each person bought an average of two beers each game.
In reality, we know that certain people are more than pulling their weight here. Which, you might think, means that there are sloshed people running around the stadium. Wrong. Officials with the university tell the Dispatch that there were less drunken problems this year than previous years. That’s despite the fact that the team is on a national championship run this year and people in the stadium have plenty of reasons to celebrate.
It makes sense that there are less alcohol issues when beer is sold in the stadium. People are pacing their drinks throughout the game rather than slamming a bunch of them down during the tailgate.
Ohio State’s not alone in the college beer sales department (there are 40 colleges that sell to the general public), but it is one of the bigger schools to do so. The University of Texas made $1.8 million last year when it started selling beer. In Ohio States case, a portion of the money went to a worthy cause: Funding for the schools center for alcohol and substance abuse.
Your alma mater not on the beer band wagon yet? Clearly it’s time to lobby for a change, because whether your team wins or loses, we could all use a beer with the game. The times they are a changin’.
