The Alcohol And Sports Deep Dive You Didn’t Know You Needed

WJ Cope7 years ago

It seems like every time I read the news, there’s a new story about the results of a scientific study that should never have been conducted. “This new study suggests that the middle child may, in fact, be the sassiest one in the family!” Wow, great — no one cares. However, the folks at Detox did some research that tackles a subject people actually care about, and they even had the courtesy to arrange their findings into pretty infographics. Let’s try to interpret what they found.

From Detox:

What makes football so fundamentally different than other sports that people drink more when their team plays poorly? I think part of it has to do with the on-and-off action of a football game. There’s a lot of downtime in football, especially in the pros where you’ll have plenty of television breaks. No matter how stoked you are to be at the game, there’s little to do but drink during breaks in the action.

That might explain why more drinking happens at football games, but why drink more when your team is losing? It’s possible that it has something to do with the price of admission. Football games are some of the most expensive sporting events you can attend, and it’s no fun to shell out $200 to watch your team get shit-canned. You might as well get stupid drunk to get some kind of return on your investment.

What really surprised me were the statistics on baseball. Alcohol is usually readily available at baseball games, and it’s a slower-paced sport than almost everything else on the chart. I’m not going to go on a whole “baseball is boring and stupid” tangent (it is), but I’d expect much more drinking to happen than what’s being shown here.

Next up, we have an infographic that deals with sneaking alcohol into sporting events.

As expected, college football takes the cake when it comes to smuggling booze. This is because there’s no turning back once you get drunk at a tailgate. If you don’t have any sweet nectar during the three-hour game, you’ll be dealing with a crushing hangover by halftime.

It makes sense that beer is the most smuggled type of alcohol, but I’d be interested in finding out if that changes with the seasons. During cold, snowy football games at my school, many people would wear large bomber jackets and ski pants so that they could comfortably bring in large amounts of alcohol. I once watched a single person smuggle in two forties, four flasks of liquor, a bag of wine, and several Four Lokos. He didn’t last all the way through the first quarter.

There’s also some info on “drinking behaviors” people exhibit during sporting events and tailgates. Chief among these are taking shots, playing drinking games, and shotgunning beers. I’d like to see more about the demographics of these activities, and perhaps a breakdown of the types of games being played. I would expect nothing less than 60% of beer pong participants to be cool dads showing that they can still hang. As for shotgunning, you’ll have a startling number of these cases:

Classic..

[via Detox]

Images via Wikimedia Commons and Detox.net