University football is a delicate thing. It’s not like university admissions, where you want to be selective.

You want everyone in the stadium. Everyone. Ticket sales are the ticket. Imagine, along the same lines, making tailgating selective!

But – and here’s where the nuance comes in – in hawking tickets to everyone, and of course in providing alcohol to everyone in the stadium, you admit and then liquor up a certain number of obscene and violent drunks. (Same thing with tailgating, as the University of Georgia has been discovering.)

There’s plenty of money in this procedure, to be sure. There’s also plenty of risk. It can backfire in some obvious ways. Well-behaved season ticket holders may cancel their order because they don’t think spending thousands and thousands of dollars to sit next to … Well, here’s how it goes at the University of Maryland, according to a commenter at the university’s student newspaper:

Maybe Kevin Anderson would like to send out a letter to all of the season ticket holders and alumni because of the guy at the top of section 18 who decided it would be cool to tell Miami that they can “suck his balls,” “eat shit!” and my personal favorite, a call to “Ass-rape the ref.”

While Anderson didn’t send out a letter about that, he did send out a letter about the last Maryland football game, in which an eleven-year-old boy, a fan of Maryland

mistakenly cheered after a play benefited Miami. According to [an email his father wrote to the university], “a U of MD student turned around and screamed, ‘F— You’ and flicked him the middle finger and almost hit him with it.”

No room for mistakes in university football! Doesn’t matter whether you’re eleven or eighty – one false move and fuck you.

Nor does the fun end, at Maryland, when the game does. At Maryland, they do post-game riots. No mention of that in the editorial I’ve been citing (in which students argue that since all big football schools feature drunken threatening fans UM shouldn’t be singled out). It’s only about in-stadium behavior.

Anyway. As I say, it’s a delicate thing. You’ve got to protect the university’s interest in admitting everyone to the stadium so that it can make millions and millions of dollars from its sports program; at the same time, you have to figure out ways of controlling the drunks enough to keep them away from children so as not to alienate non-drunk ticket holders and lose their money. Of course there’s the option of turning the stadium into a kind of police state. But that’s expensive too. And visually… and school-pride-wise… kind of a downer.