Read You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will for Free Online Page A

synonymous, and it’s foolish to try to stop it.
    Well, fast food and obesity have become synonymous, too. Should we stop trying to educate people on that linkage? Should we go completely libertarian?
    We know from a study conducted by the Institute of Alcohol Studies that 25 percent of binge drinkers commit violent offenses. On a more colloquial level, we know that alcohol plus young men equals trouble. Football games attract young men. Football games attract young men who like to drink. And
college
football games attract young men who are away from home for the first time and maybe drinking for the first time and doing stupid things out of their parents’ line of sight for the first time. Geez, what could go wrong?
    In the UK, they had a government-funded initiative to confiscate alcohol from kids 18 and under. The result? A 15 percent drop in crime. We all know the game here, and we all know the consequences. There’s a gigantic risk involved in getting young men drunk enough to be idiots. Take a minute to go to YouTube and see the violence that takes place at football games. It’s not pretty.
    There’s no part of this that makes sense. Universities should not be in the business of helping young men get drunk enough to be idiots. It’s simply not worth the risk.
    And I don’t want to hear someone say, “You can’t let a few people ruin it for everyone.” Really? Yes, you can. That’s the way laws work. We have laws throughout our country to restrict young men from doing something stupid. It’s a logical means of protecting society from young men and young men from themselves. Look at car insurance—far more expensive for young men. Look at car-rental rules—can’t rent a car until you’re 25. Laws and rules are by definition restrictive. You can’t be president till you’re 35. You can’t drive a car until you’re 16. We have a concern about young men in America; they’re the liability most insurance companies are concerned with. A nation of actuaries can’t be wrong, can it?
    But let’s not limit this discussion to college football. The NFL has an alcohol problem, too, and its alcohol problem has thepotential to become an economic problem. Right now, the NFL doesn’t have too many money issues. In fact, it’s almost impossible to find some part of the NFL that isn’t increasing: television revenue, television ratings, endorsement deals, player salaries, trainingcamp crowds. And yet the one outlier is game attendance. Game attendance is declining. Blackouts are more common. The Raiders decided to tarp off the Mount Davis section of the Coliseum to reduce seating by 11,000 and make it easier to sell out.
    Why? Why are more and more NFL fans staying home? You can run down the usual list of suspects: traffic hassles, ticket prices in a tough economy, high-definition television, the Red Zone channel.
    But you have to leave room for one major reason: the behavior inside stadiums is appalling. From the language to the behavior to the sight of grown men peeing in bathroom sinks or garbage cans, NFL stadiums are quickly becoming places that are not in the least bit family-friendly.
    Something has to be done about this. You go into an NFL stadium and the vulgarity is awful. A huge percentage of the crowd is hammered by the time it stumbles into the stadium, and now we’re letting these guys leave parking lots just
smoked
. It’s no surprise, though, because the NFL targets this crowd. And the NFL is making it worse by pushing more games late Sunday night, late Thursday night, the usual late Monday night. They’re packing seventy thousand smashed people into a stadium and then sending them out on the interstate.
    Say it out loud
.
    In many places, the macho, drunken, jersey-wearing fan feels he’s upholding some unwritten code of local fandom if he gets as drunk as possible and defends his team’s honor by getting into a fight. His language is vulgar, his mood is foul, and you better notstare at him for