Think fast! Name the school that had the riot in the stands last season. The one where the media, with near unanimous conviction, blamed alcohol sales within the stadium for stoking the tension among the fans.
No such school exists. Never happened.
People are really worried about WVU selling beer at football games now and preparing for the worst, but there’s nothing out there to suggest the Mountaineers have created a monster. In fact, they’re pretty much falling in line with a lot of other schools. Not sure how that’s a bad thing these days.
Change always seems controversial around WVU and what the university, Oliver Luck and the Board of Governors proposed Friday fell right in line with that. They’re going to sell beer! No more pass-outs! No more smoking in the concourse! And with that, the propositions were, by many, chained together and dropped into the ocean of awful ideas. Never mind the public comment period the BoG created for its education and the public’s benefit.
Many others gave it thought and consideration and made peace with the propositions and the consequences, whether they liked them or not.
Fact is, it’s 2011 now and the smoking battle is losing one. For years people have complained about the smell and the litter in those concourse areas behind the seats and the plexiglass barriers where smoking was allowed. Smokers crowded close to the barrier to see the game and get their fix. The fans who are sitting in their seats in the rows right in front of that concourse and have had to deal with the smokers behind them must now be relieved.
Additionally, no one in the Big East and no one in most professional leagues allows fans to leave the stadium and return. A lot of high schools prohibit that. I’m frankly surprised it took WVU this long to adandon that practice, which was the biggest cause of the biggest gripe about the stadium crowds — if you let people out, many of them are not coming back.
And this is what caught Luck’s attention last year.
“I’ve been around a lot of stadiums and a lot of different crowds – college, professional, different sports – and the one thing that surprised me was the number of people who left at halftime,” Luck said. “It was shocking. In some cases, there were tens of thousands of people leaving at halftime and a lot of those folks were not coming back.”
Now, this is where things get weird. To maintain an audience, yet encourage reasonably rowdy behavior, WVU proposes selling beer. Right away you can see how that keeps people in their seats, especially if they’re no longer permitted to leave the stadium and return.
But how does that address fan behavior?
Continue reading…