Football game versus tailgate party
COMMENTARY
Braden Howell

What is the value of a beer?

At any of the local pubs you can purchase a tasty cold one for a couple bucks. At Albertsons, one can rejoice in a 30-pack of Keystone Light for just $12.49 (on sale).

However, if you look around the TCU parking lots on football game days, you might get an entirely different idea of the true value of a beer. For years now, I have heard students talk about how they would go to more football games if only beer was sold inside the stadium. However, since no beer is sold, they opt to sit outside in the parking lot and nurse a keg while one of the top teams in the country, which happens to be composed of their peers, goes to work inside the stadium.

I am like many of those students. While I do go to football games, I can certainly remember a couple of occasions over the years when the beer in the keg sounded more appealing than the football on the field. Therefore, when I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Athletic Director Eric Hyman last year, I could not wait to ask him about selling alcohol in the stadium. I was supremely confident thinking that once I told him how much I thought attendance would go up, he was sure to approve of the idea.

“Well Braden,” Hyman casually responded to my question, “what it really comes down to is what is the value of a beer? Are you willing to miss great football for a beer? We let you go in and out of the stadium as much as you want, but if you really can’t go an hour or so without beer, then there’s nothing I can do about that. The students need to be leaders to each other.”

The students lead each other? No, in my mind, it had been the administration’s job to start selling beer in the stadium, and then the students would happily attend football games. Or would they? The excuse now is that they do not sell beer. If they did, would the excuse be, it’s too expensive?

TCU’s mission is “to educate individuals to think and act as ethical leaders and responsible citizens in the global community.” Act as ethical leaders? Maybe it is time the students start acting as leaders. Instead of sitting outside the stadium, sucking down a keg that will still be there after the game, students should support their home team.

Maybe it is time for a leader to emerge in each organization, clique, group or team that decides it would rather sit at the tailgate than go to the football game, and lead the students inside the stadium.

The irony of the tailgate could not be any more amusing. I know for a fact that some of the same people who spend an entire game in the parking lot have complained that TCU should be in the Big 12, or that no matter what, TCU will always be overlooked by the BCS.

Maybe it is because no one on a BCS bowl selection committee is going to choose a school that cannot get the majority of its mere 6,000 students to a game. The Big 12 does not want to invite a school into the conference whose fan support is so limited in the student body.

What is the value of a beer? If this year’s football team goes 12-0 and ends up at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, then the cost of a beer may have been a chance at a BCS Bowl, or even an invitation into the Big 12.

Sports Editor Braden Howell is a senior broadcast journalism major from Dallas. He can be reached at (b.r.howell@tcu.edu.)