Sometimes a simple little sentence says it all.
As the corrupt people who brought you the situation this sentence describes go on their summer retreat and do some really intense reposeful thinking about how they can unfuck their entirely fucked system — a system that directly benefits every one of the retreatants — they might give a thought to this sentence.
It appears in an article about one of the more notorious forms of money whoring sports universities do – selling beer to students at games.
Doesn’t always seem to work very well. One of the commenters reports from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:
UNLV sells beer at basketball and football games. It’s generally not a problem at the basketball games from what I can tell (I go to nearly every home game), but the football games are completely different. There are numerous incidents at each game because of the alcohol being sold inside the stadium. Students/young-adults are binge drinking in the parking lot at tail-gate parties and then coming in and getting more drunk. It requires a very strong police/security presence in the stands just to keep order in Sam Boyd Stadium.
And this is a UNLV game, so we’re talking only 10,000 people at most at a game (unless it’s Wisconsin and the Badger fans sell it out). Usually it’s less than that, maybe 6,000 to 8,000 people. Imagine a stadium packed with 80,000, it would be nuts. Actually just last season the university made the paid tail-gate lot go dry because of the incidents that occurred during the UNLV/UNR game. I think the universities considering selling beer just to make a few extra bucks are greatly underestimating the problems that accompany it.
Great synergy. Your team sucks, so no one comes to the games. You figure plying students with drink might bring them in, but it doesn’t because your team sucks. Meanwhile your school (and it’s not a very good school to start with – UNLV I mean) has no budget because the state (Nevada I mean) doesn’t care about education, and because you’re in hock for all the big-time athletics stuff you thought was such a great idea.
So sucky team plus you don’t even make the money on booze you thought you’d make because … what did the commenter say? Six thousand a game? Six thousand pissed losers? Watched over by a “very strong police/security presence”? (That costs money too.)
I’m not sure even Samuel Beckett could sketch so arid a scenario.
August 11th, 2011 at 9:41AM
Then there are the reasons expressed by a current Regent and former majority leader of the state senate for striving to have a winning football team at the University of Minnesota. Will They Never Learn? at http://ptable.blogspot.com/2010/10/will-they-never-learn-another-reaction.html#links.
August 11th, 2011 at 10:16AM
One of the classical ways of making money is to reduce the costs of the activity…