Behold! I have updated stadium alcohol sales data from October!

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Last month, we published a story about alcohol sales at college football games. I filed a few dozen open records requests to get stadium alcohol sales data for September and August, cross-referenced that data with reported attendance figures and turned it into a chart. But first a word from our sponsor.

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Our first data batch showed Nebraska selling the most “units” of alcohol at football games and also generating the most revenue from those sales.

But that was an incomplete data set. Most of the schools that responded to our request were based in the Midwest. We didn’t request information from any FCS schools. And since the data was only for August and September, we were only getting information from a few home games.

So I listened to your feedback. And filed a ton more requests.

We filed over 80 requests on Nov. 3, trying to reach both FBS and FCS institutions. In the interest of accuracy, I also asked for scanned ticket attendance, rather than reported attendance, so we can get better information about alcohol units per individual fan. And as a control group, I decided to also ask for hot dog sales numbers.

I mean, everybody sells hot dogs, right? Not everybody wants to drink alcohol at a sporting event. But everybody can get down with a hot dog.

Several schools were unable to share data with us. A few, like Ohio State and Rutgers, told us they could only share concessions information after the entire season had concluded. Many others could not share data because they don’t control concessions sales, or a third-party vendor keeps and holds that data, rather than the school itself. A few institutions also told me their state records laws don’t require them to share this information with me, since it would be “creating a record.”

To save you from Tweeting me, the schools that were unable to provide data were: Akron, Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Michigan, Hawaii, Iowa State, Michigan, Missouri State, North Dakota, Ohio State, Oregon State, Sam Houston State, Southern Miss, Stephen F. Austin, UTSA, UConn, UCLA, USF and Virginia Tech.

A few other schools whose fanbases have the reputation for heartily enjoying adult beverages, like Iowa and Washington State, did not respond to our requests at all. A few institutions are so backed up in records requests that we might get data from our original September request sometime in May. That happens sometimes.

Here is the data we got for total units sold, including August, September and October:

And here’s the data for revenue per person, plus additional #analysis:

I recognize that I do not have the deep industry or personal experience to best contextualize this data. So I called somebody who can. Dave Ifante publishes Fingers, an independent newsletter about drinking in America. I shared the data with him, and asked if he was surprised by anything.

“The first thing that jumped out at me is the fact that Kansas State is moving more hot dogs than servings of alcohol,” he said. “What the hell is happening in Manhattan? In control states — which Kansas is not — you often see a blue law that tethers alcohol sales to food sales at a fixed revenue ratio at restaurants. Many restaurants struggle with this, especially in an era where alcohol costs are rising faster than many food costs. Rules are different in different states, and certainly within stadia, but still — Kansas State is the only school of the bunch that would have a prayer of meeting that mark. 

“As somebody who only set foot inside the University of Virginia’s football stadium a) long before it began selling alcohol in Scott Stadium circa 2019, and thus b) very drunk from hours of pregame tailgates, I’m kind of astonished at how low the units-per-person are across the board. Industry insiders think about sales in terms of “occasions” —different life contexts in which customers might choose to drink alcohol, and which type — and college football games are about as prime an occasion as they come. (Not for, like, red wine, necessarily. But beer, hard seltzer, and spirits-based canned cocktails, for sure!) Obviously some big chunk of ticketholders at college games wouldn’t be ‘LDAs,’ an acronymized/anthropomorphized tag for “legal drinking age” individuals, but still. Western Michigan University at 0.2 drinks per attendee blows my mind. To me, that suggests either price aversion, limitations on access… or that the average Bronco just doesn’t buck very hard.“

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The last time I published data like this, I openly wondered to what extent on-field performance might shape alcohol sales … or what other sort of variables might impact stadium alcohol sales.

Infante pointed to one variable I wasn’t measuring and hadn’t thought to consider.

“The worst thing that can happen to a beer seller is bad weather. … Beer executives at publicly traded firms, especially Boston Beer Co.’s Jim Koch, love to wheel the weather excuse out to explain a bad quarter,” he said. “That said, no matter the type of alcohol, I’d expect sales at games played in inclement weather to track two customer dynamics: lower than normal overall volume sold because of lower attendance, but higher than normal per-person sales because the diehards that were there were pounding more drinks in the stands.”

That might be a useful thing to track if I end up writing this story again after filing another batch of FOIAs for all of the regular-season data. It is a difficult thing to wrangle, given that the data is often not especially consistent between schools, and many programs take weeks to respond or compile the it.

So perhaps we’ll revisit this next month. But for now, it appears that Texas A&M has taken the crown from Nebraska. Having the best season in recent memory and a huge stadium certainly helps. But we’ll have to see what things look like at Ohio State and Iowa before any final results are shared.

Holy smokes, we’re nearly at the end of the year! We’ll do a regular schedule next week, but then Extra Points is going to go into Holiday Mode, publishing only once a week until Jan 5.

We also have been adding new football coaching contracts and extensions to the Extra Points Library and adding more features and clues to our games, like Who’s That Football team.

FOIAs aren’t free, sadly. We spent more than $250 filing requests for this booze story. If you enjoy our work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, so you can get everything we write.

Enjoy your weekend! I’ll see you on the internet on Monday.