With the once promising football season drawing to an excruciating close, we can soon expect to hear phrases such as “back to the drawing board” and “rebuilding year” from a frustrated coaching staff.
But Randy Walker and his assistants aren’t the only ones who should rework their gameplans in the offseason. The Associated Student Government needs to rethink its tailgate strategy as surely as Walker must scrutinize his defense.
ASG President Jordan Heinz and his colleagues succeeded in bringing pregame alcohol tailgates back to Ryan Field this season, but only in a limited and disappointing fashion.
We congratulate ASG for making the best of a bad situation. But unfortunately, the student crowds, and the valued sense of community they were supposed to bring with them, never materialized. The primary corporate sponsor, 1800 Club, wavered when it became clear the new tailgates were not the campuswide event many had hoped they would be. Seniors, remembering the bacchanal fests before the 1999 prohibition on alcohol at tailgates, shook their heads and muttered into their beers that the glory days were gone forever.
We need not wallow in nostalgia, but we ought to think constructively and creatively about how we can recapture the spirit of the old tailgates within the unavoidable structure of the new ASG events.
Heinz and ASG deserve credit for following through on their promises and for bringing to fruition the process set in motion by former President Adam Humann. They also moved quickly to replace 1800 Club with Budweiser when its support grew shaky and were determined and pugnacious in their negotiations with sometimes hostile administrators. But there are fundamental flaws in the ASG tailgate model that have hindered their efforts.
Most notably, restricting tailgates to students 21 and older made it nearly impossible for them to be campuswide, community-building events, and gave little incentive for fraternities to move their tailgates from the relative freedom of the quads to the structured scrutiny of the stadium parking lot. But, of course, no ASG-organized, university-sanctioned event can endorse the flagrant violation of law. The underage drinking catch-22 is a perpetual thorn in the side of any large-scale, officially organized party.
Fundamentally, fun is built from the bottom up, not the top down. University-sanctioned events always will have too many rules and too many liability-conscious administrators looking over everyone’s shoulders. As such, ASG only can hope to be the catalyst and the facilitator for reviving the old tailgate spirit — the real commitment must be from individual students willing to take some initiative and some risk. Just as Walker’s best-laid plans will fizzle if his players fail to show up, tailgates never will succeed unless students come to play.
But ASG should not abandon its hard-won tailgates. Senators should work with Greek and student group leaders to build a more organic, grassroots tailgate culture around the structured ASG core. Individual students, or student groups, tailgating in the parking lot at Ryan Field does not require an elaborate plan, just a shared idea.
To make that spontaneous process easier, NU administrators must continue to support the idea of tailgates and try to ease the bureaucratic red tape that intimidates students. It’s in the university’s interest to have a happy and united student body, and successful tailgates, while not a panacea, would be great for campus morale.
We don’t pretend to have all the answers to the tailgate quandary. We recognize the challenge in organizing a large event that feels spontaneous and also in creating spontaneous events that feel organized.
So, we hope that despite all the obstacles, NU finds a way to make this work.
With the football team no longer drawing students with last-minute heroics and bowl hopes, rejuvenated tailgates could play an important role in sustaining attendance at Ryan Field.
