Sold Out! First night with in-stadium beer sales a success (mostly)

When Jeremiah Donati announced in early August that TCU would be bringing long-awaited beer sales to Amon G. Carter the results were... mixed.

On twitter, we found ourselves in the middle of a veritable party, where what tends to be a younger crowd celebrated the fact that they could finally buy beer with their Horned Frog Football. On Facebook... well...

After weeks of discussion and back and forth, we got to see for ourselves how bringing alcohol into the equation stadium-wide played out during an actual game Saturday night, when the Frogs welcomed the Golden Lions of Arkansas-Pine Bluff to The Carter for the 2019 season opener.

Long lines due to construction put a damper on the festivities early, but the frustration seemed to end quickly, as reports began to circulate that concessions had sold out of Coors Light and Miller Lite - by the middle of the second quarter.

So, that would tell us that it was a rousing success, right?

It’s hard to get an accurate read on the overall success of failure of the venture though; the combination of a lesser opponent and a less-than compelling game made for a sparse crowd after halftime. The new in and out policy certainly seemed to land on more “out” for this particular contest, and with the next two home games being against SMU and Kansas, it’s likely we won’t have an on-field reason to stay until Texas comes to town on October 26th.

While there was plenty of praise for the new in-game stadium experience - the video board, sound system, new concession items, and happy hour pricing seemed to go over extraordinarily well with fans, as did the alcohol sales (for the most part). In a very unscientific poll on twitter that we took, 53% of votes said that beer sales were a success, 30% says it was good but needs improvement, 9% thought it didn’t go well, and 6% said we shouldn’t be doing it. Fans cited confusion over how the bracelets were distributed:

Others cited incidents with intoxicated fans:

While others seemed to think it worked out:

While there will need to be some tweaks to the system (and someone needs to figure out how to get students in the stadium more efficiently around the construction), the hard work that Jeremiah Donati and the TCU Athletics staff put into the stadium and in-game experience paid off in big ways Saturday night. For the first game day, it’s hard to argue that in-stadium beer sales weren’t a success. It didn’t seem that there were more incidents or that fans were unruly or out of control (more than normal at least). They’ll need to do a better job of ordering in the future, apparently, and bigger opponents will bring a bigger spotlight to any negatives that occur.

But for now, drink up Frog fans (in a healthy, appropriate way and have a designated driver or alternate transportation available). We will see you back at The Carter in three weeks.