CORRECTION: 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:

IMPORTANT UPDATE: 11/5/2025

A previous edition of this story, published on 11/4, showed Wisconsin as far and away the leader in alcohol sales, pulling in a million dollars more than the number two program on our list, Nebraska. Nobody batted an eye at this result, because, well…I’ve been to Wisconsin, and so have my coworkers.

But on Tuesday afternoon, reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tipped me off and suggested that my numbers might not be accurate. After making a few phone calls, I learned they were right. Somehow, I published a chart with Wisconsin’s 2024 alcohol sales data, not their data from 2025 August and September.

Below is the corrected sales data. It turns out that while the good people of Wisconsin do love to (responsibly!) enjoy adult beverages, attendance has declined so much at UW football games this season that their alcohol sales numbers have actually gone down.

Here is the corrected data. I very much regret the error:

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. If your favorite school isn’t listed here, it’s because they didn’t respond to my FOIA, don’t have to respond to my FOIA, or cannot share the data right now. I plan to file again after the regular season for a more complete data set, one that will include FCS programs.

As many people on social media pointed out, it’s hardly fair to compare a stadium of 90,000 people to one with 30,000 people. 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: