Breakfast of Champions: Half-Price Beer at 9 A.M.

The University of Tennessee has alcohol rules, alcohol enforcement, alcohol intervention and medical amnesty for alcohol emergencies. Also: hurry up, the beer sale ends at ten.

At 9 a.m. this morning, the University of Tennessee opened Neyland Stadium for its noon game against Texas. President Trump is attending, enhanced security is in place, and UT understandably wants more than 100,000 people through the gates early rather than attempting a human funnel into Secret Service screening at 11:45.

So the university came up with an incentive: half-price concessions from 9 to 10 a.m.

Including alcohol.

That’s not somebody fucking around on Instagram. UT Athletics announced it: “Fans can enjoy half-priced concessions (including alcohol) inside of Neyland Stadium from 9-10 a.m.” 

Nothing says student health and wellness quite like happy hour before breakfast.

Before this starts sounding like a Nancy Reagan morality lecture, let me disclose my bias. I would love a good round of beer pong before a football game. I am an old, fat alcoholic, so for me that experiment has already been run and the results were conclusive. It doesn’t work.

But I am not opposed to college fun. I hope college kids tailgate, scream themselves hoarse, paint their faces, flirt badly, make lifelong friends and do stupid shit they’ll still be laughing about at 40.

I’m opposed to kids getting hurt.

And alcohol is very good at helping that happen.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimates that 1,519 college students ages 18 to 24 die each year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor-vehicle crashes. In 2024, 25 percent of full-time college students ages 18 to 25—about 2.3 million people—reported binge drinking in the previous month. Nearly 5 percent reported consuming ten or more drinks in a row within the previous two weeks. 

College kids do not need an SEC university to introduce them to excessive drinking.

They have cracked that code.

So my issue isn’t, Oh my God, people are drinking beer at a football game. Without UT’s promotion, would students and fans still get drunk and engage in risky behavior?

Yes. Yes they would.

The question is whether the university itself needs to incentivize it.

That becomes especially weird when you look at what the University of Tennessee says the other six days of the week.

UT has liquor-law enforcement. It has disciplinary referrals. Its annual campus-safety report includes liquor violations among the offenses it tracks and specifically notes that the category doesn’t even include DUI or drunkenness. In 2022 alone, UT reported 92 liquor-law arrests and 666 liquor-law disciplinary referrals across its Clery-reporting geography. 

The university also has alcohol education, intervention and medical-amnesty policies because, correctly, it recognizes that alcohol can produce real emergencies.

So the institutional message is something like:

Drinking can be dangerous. We have rules. We have police. We have disciplinary proceedings. We have interventions. If your friend becomes dangerously intoxicated, please call for help.

And then Saturday morning:

OK, not really. It’s 9 a.m. Here, kids. Beer is half price.

This is less a morality problem than a consistency problem.

Anyone who grew up in a family rife with alcoholism will recognize the communication style immediately. Dysfunctional families are masters of mixed messaging. Dad says drinking is destroying everything, then pours another bourbon. Mom says this cannot continue, then quietly cleans up the mess. Everybody agrees there is a problem until acknowledging the problem becomes inconvenient.

Right now UT looks a little like a dysfunctional alcoholic family.

Alcohol is dangerous—except when we need you through the gates early. We enforce liquor laws—but hurry, the sale ends at ten. We have intervention programs for risky drinking—but have you seen these prices?

That’s a bad way to run a family and a bad way to lead an institution.

And yes, I understand that all concessions are half price. Alcohol wasn’t singled out. That actually raises the obvious question: why include it?

Discount breakfast. Discount coffee. Discount hot dogs. Give everyone entering before ten a biscuit, an orange foam finger or a commemorative Peyton Manning bobblehead. This is Tennessee. Surely somebody can locate a sausage biscuit.

But alcohol?

Price is an incentive. That is why sales exist. Nobody at Target marks Tide down 50 percent because management is hoping you’ll exercise moderation and purchase precisely as much detergent as you otherwise would.

If alcohol poses enough risk that a university needs enforcement, intervention programs and emergency policies, perhaps the university itself does not need to say, Come early and we’ll make the intoxicant cheaper.

Then there is the money.

I wondered whether Tennessee at least imposes some meaningful “damage tax”—some version of you broke it, you bought it—that follows alcohol downstream toward treatment and the predictable social costs.

Not exactly.

Tennessee’s beer barrelage tax is $4.29 per 31-gallon barrel, plus a separate wholesale beer tax. According to the state budget, 0.41 percent of the barrelage privilege-tax revenue is reserved for alcohol and drug treatment programs. 

Four-tenths of one percent of that particular beer tax.

That ought to cover a Band-Aid and maybe the cab ride to detox.

And because I have a special weakness for red-state lectures about government dependency and rugged self-reliance, there is this delightful footnote: Tennessee’s current FY 2026–27 budget projects 33.5 percent of state spending coming from federal sources—about $19.4 billion. 

Rugged individualism, apparently, is a team sport.

None of this means Tennessee is uniquely evil, college football is bad or students shouldn’t drink. It means institutions ought to have some relationship between what they say and what they do.

My own recovery has taught me many things, but one of the simplest is that mixed messages are poison. Words are cheap. What matters is whether the words and the behavior match.

UT says alcohol carries enough risk to require rules, cops, disciplinary systems, prevention programs and emergency protocols.

Then at nine in the morning the behavior says:

Drinking is a bad idea.

OK, not really. Let’s have a sale.

College kids were perfectly capable of getting drunk without the University of Tennessee’s assistance.

Maybe higher education could leave that particular part of their education to them.