Football and alcohol: they go hand in hand for many people.

The security entrance for the student section at this year’s highly anticipated USC Trojans versus UCLA Bruins game was filled with people who were swaying, smoking and even throwing up. Fans inside the stadium stood in long lines waiting for beers, with prices going from about $14 to $20. One thirsty fan asked someone how long he’d been waiting and was told 45 minutes. The man got in line anyway.

The USC Trojans, one of the top 25 college football teams in the nation, have called the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, their home since 1923. The stadium can host up to 77,500 fans, and many games attract capacity crowds. This means an arena that’s filled with tens of thousands of fans who are cheering, excited and invested.

For the first time in 16 years, these fans can also be found drinking openly. This season, USC lifted an alcohol ban at home games that was put in place in 2005. When the ban was put in place, USC cited "increased surliness, foul language and other behavior that was harming the atmosphere."

"Longtime attendees at our games have witnessed an escalation in the rude behavior of fans, rudeness that is almost always exacerbated by alcohol consumption," said Steven Sample, then-president of USC, in a letter to season ticket holders.

It’s hard to say if removing alcohol from the Coliseum reduced rowdy behavior from crowds, as people continued to get arrested at games over the years and USC has released no statistics of their own on the effects of the ban. One thing that’s certain is that the ban didn’t fully remove the presence of alcohol.

Over half of Football Bowl Championship schools sell alcohol, six of which are Pac-12 schools. A few other schools with long-term bans on stadium-wide alcohol sales lifted them this year, including the University of Washington and UCLA, whose ban started in 1989.

“When they put the ban in place, I thought it was absolutely stupid,” Cyndi Mino, who has attended USC games since the mid-90s, said. “It made a lot of people drink even more and … hidden alcohol became more prevalent. And this is hard liquor, not beer.”

A USC Annenberg analysis of Los Angeles Police Department arrest data showed that even though alcohol wasn’t served, officers still made a significant number of arrests on Trojan game days in the last decade; more than 450 arrests made at the Coliseum’s address from 2010 to 2019, including 159 on game days.

Sgt. Michael Gannon has been the LAPD Special Events Coordinator for the South Bureau, which encompasses the Coliseum, since 2005. He says this season has been “smooth sailing” so far, with fewer problems incited by “drunken foolishness.”

While the number of incidents is lower this year than previous years, the stadium appears notably more empty, following a trend of decreased attendance at USC games over recent years as well as at other collegiate football games.

Frequent attendees describe putting beer into CamelBak bags, placing squashed plastic water bottles filled with liquor in their pockets and hiding bottles of hard alcohol in their pants.

“Anytime you restrict something, people are going to find a way to take advantage of it,” Gannon said.

Efficacy of bans at collegiate football stadiums

USC Athletics repeatedly declined to speak about their decision to bring alcohol back. They refused to elaborate on how the decision to bring back alcohol was made, whether the reintroduction of sales changed game-day environments or address the effects of the pandemic.

In an August press release, they stated the decision was made to "enhance the football gam day experience" and was based on data that showed allowing in-stadium alcohol sales increases “the probability of responsible drinking and fan behavior by cutting back on dangerous levels of alcohol consumption at pre-game tailgating.” A similar statement was made by UCLA, which started serving alcohol throughout their stadium this year for the first time since 1989.

The data on whether banning alcohol reduces rowdy behavior is mixed, with studies showing opposing findings on whether alcohol bans or in-stadium alcohol sales are more effective. The University of Colorado at Boulder instituted a beer ban at football games in 1996 and a study of its effects found that ejections from games dropped by 50%, arrests went down 45% and the number of students referred to the school's judicial affairs office went down by 89%.

However, when West Virginia University introduced in-stadium alcohol sales in 2011, they saw game day arrests drop by 35%. In contrast, a 1990 study that looked at four years of medical incidents at a major collegiate football stadium found that after fans were banned from bringing alcohol in (at no time had the stadium itself sold alcohol), there was no notable change in the rates of incidents.

The conflict in these results shows there isn’t a consensus right now about whether, when looking to reduce deviant behavior in crowds, alcohol bans reduce, increase or don’t affect incidents. USC has not made public what data they looked at when deciding to end the ban so, while their findings indicated to them that in-stadium sales were beneficial, it’s unclear what studies they analyzed.

The problem with banning something that people want doesn’t mean they won’t have it, they’ll just find another way. Banning alcohol doesn’t totally remove it from the stadiums and may encourage heavy drinking at tailgates among those who are intent on being intoxicated. The European National League Premier and League Two is looking at lifting a 36-year ban on drinking in seats at games, with former sports minister Tracey Crouch saying that it creates a culture of binge drinking.

“I think now that people know they have the opportunity to go inside and still purchase some alcohol keeps them from trying to binge drink before they go into the stadium,” Sgt. Gannon said.

He recalled a game in 2019 where a fan tried to sneak beers upon beers into the Coliseum in his pants, jacket and sweater pockets, comparing it to clowns coming out of a clown car and calling it a good example of how badly people want to have alcohol while at football games.

Scot Obler is a member of the USC Athletics Board of Counselors and started going to games in the early 1970s. When the decision was made to lift the alcohol ban, an informal survey was taken where people were asked for their responses.

The potential for profits

Although USC will not disclose the amount of revenue generated by concession sales, other colleges have; when the University of Texas introduced alcohol at home games in 2015, it made $1.8 million off of alcohol sales alone in that year’s season. West Virginia University’s Mountaineer Field once sold over $120,000 in beer in a single evening.

“It’s shocking to me watching people buy those big beers for $15 or $20 and how many people go back for seconds and thirds,” Obler said. “I’m astounded, like wow. You really like your beer.”

Attendees of football games often buy a lot of beer; an LA Times report that looked at four major stadiums in California showed that at the Coliseum during the 1989 season, 24,000 to 26,000 beers were sold at each Trojan game.

“Concessions [are] a moneymaker,” Gannon said. “I really think that concessions in general are a money booster for a venue, and obviously alcohol consumption contributes to that income.”

Alcohol was previously banned on a game-by-game basis: after a 1990 Pittsburgh Steelers game resulted in a fan being brutally beaten there was a one-game beer ban at the next month’s Raiders game, who played at the Coliseum from 1982 to 1994. At the time, members of the Coliseum Commission subcommittee said they were unsure how long the ban would last and whether it would be permanent.

While USC continued to ban alcohol at games on a case-by-case basis, it was another 15 years until alcohol at home games was completely removed.

Alcohol and deviancy

The most prominent reasons for arrests at the Coliseum over past years were drunkenness, liquor law violations, narcotic drugs law violations, aggravated assault and “miscellaneous” violations. Almost all of the miscellaneous charges were for trespassing and vandalism, along with a few for violation of parole or illegal ticket sales. Of the liquor law violations, most were for minors in possession of alcohol.

The main annoyance occupying the LAPD this season involves helping employees of the nearby California Science Center maneuver the crowds on game days.

“[Coliseum concession staff] have a responsibility,” Gannon said. “The fact that they stop serving alcohol after the third quarter gives people the fourth quarter to finish their beer, but mostly to start sobering up so that they can head home.”

There were 19 arrests at the Coliseum from 2010 to 2019 on home game days for assaults or aggravated assault. This doesn’t mean that there were only 19 incidents of assault, as there were likely many more, rather that 19 times an assault was severe or disruptive enough to cause the police to arrest them.

Alcohol has different effects on different people, and can lead to people having more intense emotions. According to John Monterosso, an associate professor of psychology at USC, people who are drinking have less mental resources and as a result, it’s more common for one thought or event to take more than its normal share of attention in someone’s mind and emotions be more exaggerated. At a sporting event, this means that anger can be more problematic. If someone is upset about something, like the presence of a rival team’s fan or a “bad call” by a referee, they’re more likely to have a disruptive reaction.

“[Inhibition] can be a nice thing socially in the right context,” John Monterosso, an associate professor of psychology at USC, said. “But [when] you get a mob of people who cross a line that none of them would individually … they’re all ceding their normal judgment to this group thing that's going on. Things can become more extreme.”

This year’s football season has been fairly mild in terms of raucous behavior. There was only one game day where anyone was arrested at the Coliseum, which was the Sept. 11 game against Stanford. That game saw seven people arrested, including two booked on suspicion of aggravated assault. It was an eventful game in its own right: the Trojans lost 28-42, a score that led to the firing of Clay Helton, and a fight broke out, according to Gannon. It’s likely that the spike in aggressive behavior was due to the charged, emotional environment of the Coliseum on that day.

Tailgating is often considered a cornerstone activity of football, with barbecue grills and social drinking galore. It often attracts older fans such as USC alumni; out of everyone arrested for drunkenness, nearly every single person was a male and about 80% were at least 40 years old.

“It's part of that college football experience,” Gannon said. “This year, with USC limiting the hours of tailgating to six hours prior to kickoff, I think that's played a big role; people can still come out and get their barbecue going and have their drinks before they come into the stadium, but I also think it limits how much they do drink.”

USC hasn’t announced any plans to reinstate the ban or made statements of their findings on the efficacy of the ban or any failures surrounding the reintroduction of alcohol. The removal of alcohol from home games didn’t eliminate violations of the law at the Coliseum and it certainly didn’t stop people from finding a way to drink. With data mixed on whether the most effective way for stadiums to reduce rowdy behavior is to sell alcohol or to ban it, time will tell whether we will be an example of the benefits of in-stadium sales or an example of why bans should be kept in place.