Who is selling the most booze at football games this year? We FOIA'd to find out.

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

One strategy I’ve seen mentioned pretty regularly when it comes to finding new ways to grow athletic department revenue: alcohol!

Schools license their IP to make official beers, earning licensing revenue from bars and gas stations across the state. At sporting events, they sell booze, from bottled domestic beer to fancier cocktails. And they hope that booze sales will slow down problematic and dangerous drinking behaviors, while maybe also selling a few more bags of popcorn.

All of that makes sense to me. But who does this the best? Who is selling the most booze?

To figure this out, we filed open records requests to 45 public institutions at the start of October, asking for total alcohol unit sales numbers for home games across August and September, as well as the total revenue.

Some schools were unable to share data with us because they do not control their own concession sales. That might be because stadium owners control concessions (like in the cases of UCLA and South Florida, which play in stadiums other entities own) or because concession sales and operations have been completely outsourced. Other schools, like Ohio State, are only able to run numbers at the end of the season. A few schools, like Memphis and Purdue, declined to share data at all.

But 21 institutions did respond to our requests. Here’s the data we were able to obtain, sorted by total revenue:

If any school leader reading this story wants to send over their sales numbers, I’ll be more than happy to update this table. I will also update this data if and when additional schools respond to our open records requests.

So Wisconsin generated the most revenue over the first month of the season. Should we be surprised? Camp Randall is a huge stadium! Of course it earned more money than a place like Ball State. The poor Cardinals only had two games in September, anyway.

Fair points! So we decided to go a little deeper. We also looked up the official attendance numbers for all of those schools for all home games in August and September, then did a little #math to figure out which schools generated the most unit sales per fan and which generated the most revenue per fan.

Here’s what our data showed us:

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