Messed around with some math the other day and the eyes were opened. Oliver Luck has been told and believes if the Board of Governors passes the proposed policy change and allows beer sales at WVU football games the athletic department can generate somewhere between $500,000 and $1.2 million.

Say he lands right in the middle. That’s $850,000 from beer sales in the 2011 football season. Using attendance from last season as a guide, seven home games in 2011 would be worth $121,428.57 per game and $2.16 per person.

That’s very loose math, but let’s buckle up and make a reasonable leap. WVU basketball had 14 home games in the 2010-11 season and an average attendance of 11,468. If beer was sold at the Coliseum, one could reason seeing another $346,792.32 in the bank.

So there are two immediate questions in the first week of May and the first days of the long and vacant offseason months. First, how long can that money stay on the table? Two, is it naive to believe beer would only be sold at Mountaineer Field?

You might begin by thinking WVU is being open and honest and interested only in selling beer at football games. That’s entirely possible. But you also accept WVU is willing to leave all that money out in plain sight. That’s also entirely possible, if not plausible. Still, it’s unfair to make this a one-sided discussion and simply and immediately accept WVU is interested in the money.

Yet there is the other side here and another logical basis to begin with is to presume money matters. Withthat, maybe too much change is too much for the (paying) public to handle. You might generate a lot of negative feedback, which would then sway the decision-makers and then defeat this idea. Remember, Luck said he was worried about losing a generation of fans. Too much change is too much of a risk.

The present proposition is then seen as the the “warm bath” approach where you ease into things. This way WVU doesn’t rock the boat too much and can get a look at the way the plan works for football. If it goes well, the skeptics are relieved, the proponents are further empowered and then at a later date WVU can implement beer sales elsewhere.

The way this proposal is written allows for that to happen without the 30-day public comment period transpiring now. If this passes — the comment period ends May 13 and a decision would likely come at the June BoG meeting — then WVU has the ability to sell beer at all athletic events, the ability to profit even more at all athletic events.

Luck has mentioned “counterintuitive” multiple times as he explaines the thinking behind controlling behavior at football games by selling beer. No need to revisit that, but there’s another counterintuitive element here. WVU can’t use the same vehicle to arrive at selling beer at the Coliseum.

“We don’t get the number of complaints here as we do in football,” Luck said from his office in the second floor of the WVU Coliseum. “That’s something that I don’t think right now is a necessity. The same justification doesn’t make sense for basketball as it does for football.”

Not at all. Luck knows the gameday experiences are very different. Football is an all-day event with all-day drinking. That behavior, following his thinking, is controlled better by beer sales.

Then again — and maybe it’s just me … and all those I’ve spoken to who agree — but hasn’t past behavior been more problematic at the Coliseum? Isn’t that where profanities fly, chants make us cringe, students rush the playing surface and fans throw things at opponents?

Is that at least not the perception?

So WVU wrapped its minds around that problem and throttled the bad elements late in the 2010 season and then throughout 2011. The reaction? Maybe you disagree, but the majority of the comments I heard from those concerned enough to contact me, or to speak loudly enough that I heard them, suggested the Coliseum became a little too tame. And attendance, in the season after the Final Four, dropped by 1,000 per game.

Beer sales would then, one would presume, grow the crowd and fuel the fans … which is exactly the premise WVU is not pursuing at present. Time will only tell here.

“I said from the very beginning we’re trying to do two very different things,” Luck said. “It’s somewhat contrarian to try to have a civil crowd so parents or kids aren’t subjected to a lot of coarse language, but at the same time you want to have a home field, home court, home pitch advantage. You want the visiting team to come in and be a little intimidated.”