When No. 5 Louisiana State (4-0) hosts Mississippi (3-1) on Saturday night, The Chute and the Skyline Club are bound to be crowded with fans who would like a beer or three.
The Chute is on the ground floor of Tiger Stadium near the southern end zone. The Skyline Club offers a stunning God’s-eye view of the field and a vista beyond the stadium of Baton Rouge’s tidy downtown and the Mississippi River.
“When I’m at home, I drink beer,” said Lisa Boswell, a guest at The Chute last week, when L.S.U. hosted Louisiana Tech. “I’m used to going to Saints games, where you can have beer.”
Broad alcohol sales are still relatively new to college football, though. And nowhere are they more limited than in the Tigers’ league, the Southeastern Conference, which bans their sale at home games to general-admission guests.
L.S.U., where tailgates are so elaborate that it can be a challenge to persuade fans to leave their grills and their coolers and actually go inside, is defying a cultural bias against in-stadium alcohol sales while skating within the letter of conference rules in a bid to offer the model of a modern college football game day.
“Our competition isn’t necessarily going to some other games or going to the movies,” said David Taylor, the university’s assistant athletic director for game and event management. “It’s staying home and watching it on your flat-screen.”
Across the country, alcoholic beverages have long been available to the muckety-mucks who spend thousands of dollars a year in season-ticket fees and donations for fancy suites and premium seats. And of course they are ubiquitous at professional sports events.
But there was long a taboo on alcohol sales to most ticketholders, in deference to the many underage students in attendance as well as to college sports’ appeal (or pretense) as an amateur, good-natured spectacle. Besides, there were always those tailgates.
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