Everybody ready? On your mark, get set, chug.
That was the message our tailgate-obsessed student body took to Saturday morning's main event. I arrived at 8:15 a.m., armed with 648 cans of Busch Light, Beast Light, High Life, and fill-in-the-blank beer that tastes like urine but goes down easy.
Based on the average Duke scholar's Friday bedtime, I figured I would be one of the first to show. Au contraire, most tailgating groups were up and sprinting.
Most were already drinking their brains out, and the last thing on anyone's mind-even further than next week's physics exam-was the noon kickoff between Duke and Virginia Tech. After all, this will likely be the 11th consecutive season of atrocious Duke football. The losing and the way we lose is so hard on the eyes that you really can't blame us fans for wanting to stay in the back corner of an unpopular parking lot with the intent of damaging our livers.
With student attendance in steady decline over the last decade, someone came up with the brilliant idea of forcing every student to leave the tailgate zone at kickoff. This someone apparently believes that all the undergrads would follow the yellow brick road and take their seats in Wallace Wade.
He wanted a football atmosphere similar to the other ACC schools, whose students dream about football like Cameron Crazies drool over basketball. What they underestimated, however, is that the students would instead look for another venue in which to continue getting ripped.
The phenomenon that began in the blue zone and continued elsewhere after kickoff is called binge drinking. The technical definition is five drinks in one sitting, which is to us Dukies what an ounce of weed was to Johnny Depp in Blow.
Binge drinking is a big concern to the Duke administration. To said administrators, binge drinking is the homicide of drinking charges. You can't shotgun beers, you can't throw dirty quarters into cups of beer, you can't play beer pong and you can't use beer bongs. If binge drinking is such a crime, why encourage us to drink faster?
There are further safety issues that should worry the Duke brass about these new rules. Students that are busting to get over to the blue zone by 7:59 will a) sleep less, b) get drunker on less alcohol and c) not have the time for luxuries like eating breakfast.
There is such a plethora of new dangers arising from the new tailgate laws that it appears filling Wallace Wade Stadium is more important to these decision-makers than the safety of the students.
Oh, and I left out the most critical of all safety issues-students coming from off campus are all piling into cars, a good chunk of which are being driven by drunk drivers, all of which now leave at the same time.
Now I have no idea whose decision it was to amend tailgate law, so it's unfair to go around and point fingers. But I did get an e-mail explaining the whole situation from some guy named Larry, and he was pretty adamant about going to watch our Blue Devils, so he must have something to do with it.
I agree that there is a problem when students place so much importance on the pregame festivities that the game becomes meaningless. But I disagree with such an illogical remedy.
If you think about it, there are two main reasons why we tailgate and don't go to the games. 1) The opposing football team always manages to bury us six feet under (Virginia Tech scored 45 points while Duke gained 35 yards) and 2) There is no on-campus partying that allows us to come close to the on-campus freedom that tailgating does.
You give me two problems and I'll give you two incredible solutions that no one in the world has ever thought of or discussed.
Solution number one: make our football team better. This objective, however, is really difficult at a prestigious academic institution like Duke. Even with relaxed standards for football players, we are still recruiting from a severely smaller pool than powerhouses like Florida State, Miami and the aforementioned Virginia Tech.
Solution number two: allow the students to party on weekend nights like we party during tailgate. This is really easy because all it requires is telling those RAs and RCs to stop acting like rent-a-cops on power trips and just make sure everyone is safe.
Therefore, if you want us to come to the games willingly instead of forcing us to go, just let us have as much fun as we want, as long as we want, as often as we want and whenever we want.
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