SBJ College: Bar Exam

My first item tonight about “Beer in Boone” brings back the memories. It’s hard to imagine that you couldn’t buy alcohol in Boone until 1986. Before that, you had to make the eight-mile drive to Blowing Rock, NC.

Here’s what is cooking on campus:

ALCOHOL SALES BECOMING NEW NORM AT COLLEGE VENUES

In-venue alcohol sales could help schools like N.C. State keep fans in seats rather than returning to tailgate spots

• The last time “Beer in Boone” was an issue, I was a student at Appalachian State and the small, dry town in the North Carolina mountains was voting on whether to permit alcohol sales. “Beer in Boone” has a different meaning now. App State is talking about alcohol sales throughout Kidd Brewer Stadium, something that might become a reality this season because of a new state law. Tomorrow, App State AD Doug Gillin will meet with the school’s BOT to discuss the prospects of selling alcohol at all athletic venues -- a trend that is prompting similar conversations on campuses all over the country.
  
  
• If schools aren’t already selling alcohol to the general crowd during games, then they’re talking about it. In North Carolina, beer and wine sales are not permitted at collegiate athletic venues, but the senate and house passed a bill this week to remove that ban. It sits before Gov. Roy Cooper and assuming he signs it, public schools such as UNC, N.C. State, ECU and App State will be free to sell alcohol throughout their venues. The SEC lifted its own ban of alcohol sales last month.
  
  
• SBJ’s last survey in 2017 showed that 36 FBS schools at the time were selling beer in general seating areas, not including 14 more that play off-campus. The consensus among ADs at those schools is that selling beer and wine increases revenue, enhances the fan experience, attracts a younger demo and decreases drunken incidents.
  
  
• At places like N.C. State that permit fans to exit the stadium at halftime and return, selling alcohol might keep fans from returning to their car for a refill, which tends to leave a lot of unfilled seats at the start of the third quarter. Wolfpack coach Dave Doeren told the Raleigh News & Observer: “We have one of the best gamedays in the country in the first and second quarter. It would be awesome to be able to keep it that way in the third.”
  
  
• In five years, every FBS school will be selling beer and wine in their football and basketball venues. We’ve already seen several schools move in that direction for the coming football season. Just last week, Texas A&M said it would start selling beer, Middle Tennessee State introduced a new end-zone beer garden and UTEP revealed plans for an end-zone party deck at the Sun Bowl -- all hoping to create a cool factor that will keep fans coming back.
  
  

UAB BLAZES NEW PATH WITH LEARFIELD IMG COLLEGE

• UAB’s new multimedia rights agreement will put it among the top three schools in Conference USA for media and marketing revenue. A deal with Learfield IMG College will pay the school $17 million over 10 years with a $1 million signing bonus. An average of $1.7 million guaranteed represents an enormous increase from UAB’s previous deal with IMG College that paid $355,000 last year. The old deal was severely diminished when the Blazers stopped fielding a football team in 2015 and 2016.
  
  
• UAB’s resurgence started when football was reinstated in 2017. Average attendance at Legion Field has been 25,333 in the team's first two seasons since returning compared to 16,195 in the two seasons before the program was disbanded. UAB also won the C-USA football championship just a year after reinstatement and, at about the same time, launched plans for a new $180 million football stadium in uptown Birmingham. “There’s a lot of great things going on here,” AD Mark Ingram told me this afternoon.
  
  
• While terms of the new deal were negotiated last fall -- before Learfield’s merger with IMG College -- the new Learfield IMG College team honored the value of the deal. That’s important to note because Learfield IMG College management has been effusive that it will not undercut rights fees, and in this case it didn't. Exec VP/University Partnership Group Mike Hamilton and VP/Multimedia Rights Tom Stevens closed the pact on the Learfield IMG College side, while Dan Gale from Leona Marketing Group assisted UAB.
  
  

SPEED READS

All eyes have been on freshman phenom Zion Williamson headed into tonight's NBA Draft

• Tonight is the night for Zion Williamson. Back in March, I wrote about how the business of Zion was expansive across virtually all aspects of college basketball. Williamson impacted social media, TV viewership, ticket demand and the sneaker industry. Now, he’ll take all that hype from one season at Duke and try to turn himself into a marketing force in NOLA and beyond.
  
  
• TD Ameritrade Park has seen a solid attendance uptick for the College World Series through yesterday’s matchups. Average attendance is up around 13% over the same nine-game span last year. Florida State-Arkansas on Saturday drew 26,155 fans, which is the best figure for any CWS pool play game since 2015.
  
  
• There has long been a clamoring for D-I hockey at Illinois, but AD Josh Whitman is taking a deliberate approach before making any decision. Whitman at his end-of-year media roundtable on Tuesday noted there have been a "few things that have popped up at the 11th hour ... where I felt it best to hit the pause button and push things back." Recent hockey startups at Penn State and Arizona State have had great early success, so UI wants to follow a similar path and make sure its own program will be competitive on the ice and financially sustainable when it skates into Big Ten play.
  

THROWBACK THURSDAY

• Two years ago this week, Wichita State officially joined the American Athletic Conference as a non-football member. At the time, the Shockers were coming off six consecutive March Madness appearances, including a Final Four run in 2013 under Gregg Marshall. WSU had been a Missouri Valley member since 1945 but had growing concerns about its standing within the college hoops landscape. The move has already paid dividends for WSU's bottom line. The AAC recently signed a $1 billion, 12-year deal media rights deal with ESPN -- much more than the Shockers would have received if the program had stayed with the MVC.

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