The totals for men and women differed, as did the numbers from respondents at Division I and Division III schools. From the latter group came most of the low totals, i.e., 22 percent of men and 30 percent of women marked “0 hours per week” spent partying in conjunction with college sports events; and 16 percent males, 18 percent females checked “1–5 hours.” Only a minority of respondents from Division I schools were in those time brackets, but these students dominated the remaining ones: 23 percent males and 28 percent females marked “6–10 hours per week,” and 19 percent males, 16 percent females, “11–15 hours.” After this, almost all females dropped out, only 8 percent spending “more than 15 hours per week” on this activity. However, a cohort of males continued strong, 14 percent at 16–20 hours and 6 percent at “more than 20 hours per week.”
Nevertheless, this is only a partial photo. The numerical responses to the next question, when added to the above one, provide a more complete picture:
Question 16
On average, during the school year, how many hours a week do you spend partying—at private functions and in bars—NOT in conjunction with college sports events (include time spent arranging the party, traveling to and from the party, and at the party)? Try to calculate your daily totals and then add on your weekend total. Mark the appropriate weekly amount.
Adding up the numbers on both questions indicate that men outpartied women; thus, females dominated the lower time brackets: 2 percent of males and 11 percent of females spent “0 hours per week” partying; 10 percent males, 22 percent females, “1–5 hours”; and 11 percent males, 26 percent females, “6–10 hours.” The “11–15 hours” time bracket—39 percent males, 23 percent females—included many men at Division III schools and women at Division I schools. The “16–20 hours” cohort mainly contained men (17 percent) and women (14 percent) at Division I schools. At “21–25 hours,” all but 4 percent of the women dropped out, whereas 15 percent of the men partied on, with another 6 percent of the males continuing “above 25 hours per week.”
In examining these totals, a number of conclusions emerge: many students, particularly at Division I schools, spend far more time partying than they do studying (see Chapter 11 for these numbers); and students at Division I institutions spend more time partying “round the team” than they do at nonsports-related festivities. However, even students at Division III schools devote a fair amount of time per week to partying, usually nonsports related. In addition, the totals parallel the Harvard Public Health and the Center for Science in the Public Interest studies on High Binge and Low Binge schools, and also indicate that although women, particularly at Division I institutions, party a great deal, they have thousands of hours to spend, and oceans of alcohol to consume, before they catch up to male undergraduates at these schools.
The above numbers and conclusions provide an abstract indication of the party scene at American colleges and universities, especially big-time college sports schools, but personal comments from students put human faces on the statistics. A senior woman at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, wrote:
Many students party throughout the football and basketball seasons to support the Fighting Illini, completely forgetting their studies. Many of these students develop serious alcohol problems, and as the seasons roll along, so does their substance dependency, and their party nights get closer and closer, particularly if they start hitting the sports bars regularly.
Soon these students lose track of school and they start spiraling out of control. This may seem extreme, but it happens all the time here … . The U of I tries to inform freshmen of these risks, but the drinking culture here keeps producing more student alcoholics. Somehow schools have to get the anti-alcohol message across, but they aren’t doing it.
A fraternity house president at the University of Maryland explained how student drinkers can lose control:
I think a lot of people [students] go out with the intention of getting drunk … . I don’t think they know that they are binge drinking … . They go out to drink and have a good time with their friends, and, in their minds, they’re not doing anything wrong. They feel that they are completely in control, that they are on top of the situation. They don’t consider that they are actually doing something which is quite a problem and could lead to some very dangerous things.
Probably the University of Michigan students at Scorekeepers had similar rationalizations and feelings of omnipotence when, while observing the passed-out woman on the floor, they kept ordering more drinks. The U of M students, like their counterparts across the country, believed that they personally were immune from the effects of alcohol poisoning. No doubt the passed-out woman shared this belief.
“Drinking in college is all an elaborate game,” said an Indiana University fraternity member. “And we get so wound up in it that we completely lose sight of the bigger picture. It’s like we’ve never heard of human physiology. I’ve taken [fraternity] brothers turning blue to the E.R.” This student then detailed the “elaborate game”: how his fraternity built a special “keg room” in its house basement so that the members could hide beer kegs and cases during raids by the dean of students and the police; how it arranged for false IDs for pledges; how it rented houses off-campus as “party centrals”; how the “game” consumed enormous amounts of undergraduate time and energy; and how winning the game—“drinking until you puke and pass out … finally didn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
The IU student added, “At least I try to go to the Rec Center [recreational gymnasium] to work off my hangovers. I try to spend as much time there as I do in the bars.” This comment connects to one of the most intriguing conclusions of the Harvard and Center for Science in the Public Interest studies on binge drinking: students who frequently play intramural sports, who exercise, and also engage in superfan activities, often binge drink. In one respect, this seems contradictory: people who work out regularly and respect their bodies usually do not poison themselves by consuming too much alcohol. However, in reality, the beer-and-circus subculture has a large participatory component, not only in actively drinking and cheering for one’s team, but in playing sports and exercising. The results to the following question confirmed this:
On average, during the school year, how many hours per week do you spend in athletic activities (intercollegiate athletic training and games, intramurals, jogging, aerobics, exercising, etc.)? Try to calculate your daily totals and then add on your weekend total. Mark the appropriate weekly amount.
The intercollegiate athletes—8 percent of the female and 5 percent of the male respondents—immediately identified themselves by marking “more than 30 hours per week,” significantly higher than all other students (some of the college athletes added in the P.S. section that they spent 40, 50, sometimes 60 hours per week in their sports). At the other extreme were 6 percent females and 3 percent males who spent “0 hours per week … in athletic activities.”
Over a third of the students—38 percent females, 36 percent males—marked “1–5 hours.” Undergraduates at Division III schools dominated this time bracket, whereas many students at Division I institutions marked “6–10 hours”: 33 percent females, 42 percent males. Written and interview comments revealed that in the “1–10 hour” range, women tended to exercise, and men played on intramural and pickup teams in various sports. In the “11–20 hour” range, both women (12 percent) and men (14 percent) worked out and played on intramural teams. In addition, many women and some men regarded the exercise areas, jogging tracks, and swimming pools of their school’s recreational facilities as “social scenes,” “pickup areas,” and “great places to meet people.” Finally, the numbers indicate how much time supposedly busy college students spend in the gym as well as in other sports related activities (see Chapter 10 for the numbers on sports spectatorship). An Arizona State male senior remarked:
After doing your poll, I was amazed by how much sports occupies my college life. When I add up the time spent watchi
ng TV sports, going to games, working out, playing on my frat’s teams, and then partying in conjunction with sports, it is an unbelievable 34.5 hours per week. That’s almost five hours a day! Imagine what my GPA would be if I spent that time in the library studying (my GPA is high now, but they’d have to put me on a special 8 point scale).
A tour of Arizona State University places these comments in context: the school has lavish, state-of-the-art recreational facilities, including the latest exercise machines and a number of Olympic-size swimming pools; on the other hand, the library is underground, a dark, forbidding place. Predictably, on a typical weekday, undergraduates fill the recreational buildings, and the library is deserted. At night, students pack the off-campus bars in Tempe, as they do the stadiums and arenas when the Sun Devils play at home.
Another ASU undergraduate explained his sense of his institution and its beer-and-circus core:
Sometime in your freshmen year, you go through a transition where the college sports scene becomes your environment, rather than something that you observe from a distance as you did in high school, or as people who go to smaller schools do. You realize that being a Sun Devil, from cheering to drinking, is crucial to experiencing college life.
A sophomore male at ASU’s main rival, the University of Arizona in Tucson, put another twist on the question of time spent in sports related activities: “I’m well over the thirty-hour-a-week mark, but a lot of it is following my bets on TV and the web.” As an earlier question on sports spectatorship discovered (Chapter 10), many male students, particularly those belonging to the collegiate subculture at beer-and-circus schools, bet frequently on college sports events, and consume many hours per week tracking the games on which they have money “down.” The next chapter of this book examines campus gambling, and also the mind-set of contemporary student fans.
The results of the “hours spent” questions on the survey for this book highlight a major difference between students at NCAA Division I schools and those at Division III institutions. Big-time college sports not only plays a much more important role in the daily lives of Division I undergraduates than their counterparts in Division III, but the ancillary effects, particularly time spent in sports-related activities, especially partying, indicate significant differences in student life at these schools.
An equally important contrast occurs when responses from undergraduates at Division I-A football universities are separated from those at Division III and Division I institutions not in I-A football (mainly schools with big-time basketball programs but small-time football ones). Division I-A respondents, particularly males, spent many more hours partying, watching, betting on, and playing sports than students at all other types of schools.
Most Division I-A universities contain two essential elements of the criteria that researchers use to define High Binge schools: big-time intercollegiate athletic programs and large Greek systems. Similarly, most Division III and some smaller Division I schools have Low Binge characteristics: institutions with mainly low-key college sports programs and few or no Greeks. In addition, as discussed in previous chapters, High Binge institutions tend to be large, public research universities that neglect general undergraduate education, whereas Low Binge schools are often smaller-sized private universities and colleges that attempt to provide all of their students with quality undergraduate educations.
Finally, every college student in America has freedom of choice, and even at the highest binge schools, every undergraduate chooses how to spend his or her time. Sadly, far too many students at NCAA Division I-A universities devote numerous hours per week to drinking and big-time college sports entertainment. In fact, the main time difference in the responses to the “partying” questions from students at most Division I-A schools and those at all other institutions were the added hours that the undergraduates at I-A’s spent drinking in conjunction with the college sports circus. In many ways, I-A student devotion to beer-and-circus is the difference between a school being a High Binge or Low Binge institution.
17
RALLY ROUND THE TEAM—AS LONG AS IT WINS AND COVERS THE SPREAD
This chapter examines the mind-set of contemporary student fans, including those who bet on college sports teams. For most undergraduates, a winning team is paramount, but for an increasing number of student fans, winning is not enough; the team must also help them win their bets.
One of the most annoying things about being a UConn [University of Connecticut] student is that people constantly come up to me [in my hometown] and ask all kinds of questions about the [UConn men’s and women’s] basketball teams, as though the only reason that I came to college was to become a screaming, drunken fan of the Husky dog [the UConn mascot]. When I politely answer that I have no time to watch basketball due to a sordid desire to graduate on time, people look at me as though I might be a hippie, or a Communist, or both.
—Matthew Decapua, in a 1999 article in the
UConn student newspaper
This undergraduate admits to being unusual in placing academic ambitions above rooting for his college team, and, as he suggests, many of his fellow UConn students are “screaming, drunken fan[s] of the Husky dog.” The questionnaire and interviews for this book discovered a similar situation at most Big-time U’s: a majority of students embrace their college teams, particularly if they are championship caliber like the UConn basketball squads, and they fully enjoy the beer-and-circus atmosphere surrounding the teams.
However, a downside exists for universities and athletic departments: student fans, like most contemporary sports fans, are increasingly obsessed with winning, and they define triumph as not simply an “above .500 won-loss record,” but winning it all—winning national titles. An Ohio State senior stated, “For every Big Ten champion, there are ten losers [the conference has eleven members since Penn State joined]. Anyway, league titles don’t count for much anymore, it’s the national championship, or you lose.”
Nevertheless, students will party on whether their team wins or loses, but often they will not support losing squads by attending games or showing any school spirit toward them. “We have an awful football program,” a Ball State University junior said. “On game days, it seems like there are more students tailgating in the parking lot outside the football stadium than inside watching the game, and there are lots of frat and off-campus parties taking place while the game is going on.”
Psychology professor Robert Cialdini has long studied the fans of winning teams like those at UConn, and of losers like those at Ball State. He describes their attitudes as “basking in [the] reflected glory” of winners, and “distancing themselves” from losers. Student fans want “to associate themselves with winning teams … to boost their image in the eyes of others,” especially outside their universities; and “they believe that other people will see them as more positive if they are associated with positive things, even though they didn’t cause the positive things.” Hence, the Flutie Factor in applications for college admission—the desire by applicants to attend schools with winning college teams, even though as students at Big-time U’s, they will probably never meet the athletes or coaches responsible for the victories (see chapter 6).
Equally important to the fans’ psyche is the fear of failure, of their teams’ losing and being called, along with them, that most dreaded of contemporary epithets—“LOSER.” After the 1999 football season, a University of Iowa junior male felt that he was experiencing this nightmare:
This has been an absolutely humiliating year for me. Our football team lost almost all its games and were pathetic. It’s a personal embarrassment to me because all of my friends back home in Chicago are going to call me during [Christmas] vacation and harass me about the pitiful Hawkeyes. They’re going to rag on me for supporting a bunch of losers and going to a loser school.
The Iowa student’s comments reflected those of many other undergraduates. In interviews for this book, when asked whether loyalty to their university and its teams
would keep them rooting through losing seasons, many students stated that loyalty was much less important to them than winning, and, if their teams became or remained “losers,” they would stop attending games or even watch them regularly on TV. But almost all said that they would “party on, win or lose,” although they much preferred victory celebrations to wakes. Moreover, as the Ball State student indicated, schools with mediocre or bad teams usually have trouble filling their football stadiums and basketball arenas; some athletic departments in this situation have even given free tickets to students and had few attend.
The contemporary college student fixation on winning was echoed—and sharpened—by ESPN The Magazine when, after the 1999 men’s and women’s championship basketball games, won by UConn and Purdue over Duke teams, it proclaimed in its hipper-than-thou manner: DUKE UNIVERSITY—Two teams. Two finals. No [championship] rings? Yeah, more like Loser University.’
ESPN The Magazine also did one of its mock gambling charts on “College [Football] Fans” versus “Pro [Football] Fans,” the entries reflecting its—and its readers—doublethink on college sports: it’s wonderful/it’s ridiculous, and even championships have questionable undersides. Among the entries were:
Despite elements of sentimentality about college football (“119 years of Michigan football”), the ESPN writer also mocks it: the heroes are dumb jocks and the championship game is decided by drunken sportswriters voting for the top teams. Alcohol also envelops college fans in the stands, including in their own vomit. A college football championship is great and simultaneously tarnished. But ESPN’s most important message is: As ESPN viewers and readers, you are hip to it all.
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